Recent reviews by Verrix

GOTY 2024, if anything else happens it’s a robbery. /j (not really). I think Metaphor is at very least one of the best JRPGs of all time, if not at least in recent years. It’s the culminating experience of some of Atlus’s best performers, and combines the greatest aspects from their most successful games. I truly believe that this an absolute must-play for everyone, whether you buy it now or wait a few years for a big sale or any possible remasters (the Atlus experience™)

I’ll rate Metaphor: ReFantazio a 9.8/10

- Story/Lore: One of the best game stories I’ve played through in recent years. The start is one of the best I’ve ever seen and really gets you captured, while some of the major plot points can be guessed, there’s still surprising reveals, which no matter what are impactful. It’s hard to talk about this kind of thing since almost everything past the beginning is a spoiler, but trust me, it’s an amazing game. Additionally, I’ll touch on it more later, but you can kind of feel the fact that it was being rushed towards the end points of the game, but it’s still a very good story. It almost makes me wish we do get an enhanced version with the ending quarter or so updated. Almost.
- Characters: Unfortunately, this entire section really falls under the bracket of “massive spoiler warning”, but I can say that the characters, whether it’s party members, followers, or even just miscellaneous story NPCs are all very well fleshed out, and it just makes you want more. The limited amount of followers in comparison to the Persona games lets them actually focus on the development on certain people (not to mention there’s only 8 ranks to each and each hangout is a guaranteed rank-up no matter what you say), but I don’t think I really disliked a single character upon beating the game.
- Combat: Metaphor takes the defined team (in comparison to SMT at least) from Persona and the press turn, wide party control aspects of SMT and combines them both in a beautiful way with the Archetype system. Each one has its own strengths, not to mention characters that are best fit for them, and they’re only made better by skill inheritance and accessory effects. Another thing to note is that a key selling point of the game is the real-time combat combined with turn-based. Unfortunately, the real-time combat is really only just a more complicated form of player advantage/enemy advantage from the Persona games. If you can attack them enough and dodge in time to break their stun gauge, you get a free/first turn in combat, but if they hit you, it’s their move. Fortunately though, there is the benefit that enemies weaker than you by at least 3 levels are unable to force you into turn-based combat and you can fully kill them with just a few hits, which means you’ll only be spending MP on the mobs that mean it.
- Exploration: One of the lower points of my positives, there really isn’t a true ‘exploration’ aspect to them outside of the dungeons. The reason I’ve added it here is because the world itself is beautiful. Despite the fact that your paths are controlled, just looking at the map makes you go ‘I wonder what that area looks like’, and I find the designs of everywhere amazing.
- Graphics: Another banger artstyle from Atlus, while the character models could use some work to look more like their portraits, the rest of the game looks beautiful and is only enhanced by the amazing interface and UI. Color remains a large part of the games with the overall UI, and the battle effects and archetype designs only help to tie everything all together.
- Price: While I agree that the corporate push for $70 AAA games is ridiculous, I think this is one of the only games where the price is actually fully worth it. I actually pre-ordered from a key site with a discount, but I wish I could go back and pay full price because I believe that Studio Zero (and Atlus) deserve it.

- Completion Experience: Like any Persona game, the calendar system likes to loom over in its ever-present self. Which on one hand means you can technically get everything (except the superboss achievement) in one playthrough that ends with you beating the main story, there’s also the small caveat that to realistically do this you’ll have to look at guides to at least some extent. On the good side, however, there’s a lot more free time and less restrictiveness to your schedule than would be base P5 (aka no 3rd semester) or P3R. I definitely recommend looking up some guides at least as technically there’s quite a lot of missable things to look out for, some that will actually take up calendar time to backtrack if you miss.
- Difficulty: While on the surface, there’s the regular difficulties present in Atlus games of the standard modes, a no-death mode, and a super hard mode (Regicide/King of Kings), this seems great and has a range for everyone. Unfortunately, in Metaphor, EXP, A-EXP, Money and MAG rates are increased in the easier difficulties, which is fine, but they are also decreased in harder difficulties. Not to mention the costs of unlocking archetypes, which the cost in Regicide for end game archetypes is more than double the cost of Easy, which is a pain because, remember, the gain rates of MAG are decreased as well, and there’s no real ‘efficient’ way to grind it, either.

- New Game+/Superboss: If you are going for all achievements, I really do recommend just looking up a guide to hexedit your right-before-the-ending save to be able to fight the superboss instead of playing through the whole game again. Going into NG+ will reset both your level and archetype unlocks, though thankfully it’s just the unlocks, not the progress (hence you still need to do all the followers in NG+). It may not seem that bad, just grind it out, except the superboss is level 99. At the end of the game on the first playthrough you would be only around level 65-80 depending on how much grinding you did. Again, since there’s no actual differences besides like 1 NG+ exclusive gear, I recommend just hex editing your save. There’s a reddit post somewhere that tells you which one you need to do.
- Cut Content: While this isn’t really a true con, there’s some pretty clear in-game signs as well as datamined content of some cut content, the most major of which being (spoilers, obviously) the mage academy dungeon (and other more minor stuff that doesn’t really have an effect). While it doesn’t have a direct contribution to the game, it's clearly felt as missing in the game, and is part of the minor reasons as to why I can’t give this a 10/10.

Having first purchased this game during early access, it’s definitely grown into a full-fledged fun experience. Smooth and fun combat really make it shine, but it is bogged down a bit by a lack of true uniqueness to each run, but is still a worthwhile purchase.

I’ll rate Spiritfall a 8.6/10

- Story/Lore: There’s really not a lot, the most lore you’ll get is from the pre and post-battle dialogue from bosses, but it’s a nice little touch that gives you a reason as to why you as the player are doing this.
- Graphics: This is more on the side of effects, as technically speaking the environments and character models are decent, just nothing stands out. The visual effects of all the skills you use though, is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing, each one is so clearly defined (besides ones that just infuse your attacks with an effect ofc) and has their own style to it.
- Price: Pretty reasonably priced, especially with how there’s still plans to add more content. Doesn’t quite have the true ‘endless replayability’ as some of the more known roguelikes like Hades or Risk of Rain, but it still stands on its own quite a bit.
- Combat/Gameplay: The combat itself is pretty smooth overall, being very easy to form combos as long as you generally know how your skills work (and for some, where they send the enemies). Later on in the review I do talk about how there’s not much build variety, but I think for a good portion of your play time at least when you don’t have almost all the upgrades your build choices can matter a lot more and you’ll find yourself gravitating towards certain spirits more than others. I also think there’s quite a good amount of difference in what you’ll find in the rooms. Besides the different types, like the Relic Tinkerer, Shops, or even Hidden Rifts, there’s even some slight variation in regular combat rooms as they might have gold rocks, Yara the Herbalist, or even a Statue of Kismet.
- Bonus: You can pet the turtle.

- Completion Experience: Overall a pretty fun completion, except about half of the achievements are tied to things that you wouldn’t really do on your own (or might happen accidentally). They’re still easy things to do, per se, but you should try to go into runs with them in mind to take advantage of it if an opportunity presents itself.
- Difficulty: You’ve got the standard roguelike difficulty of run modifiers, but I honestly feel like they aren’t enough. Sure if you stack on all of them at once it’ll be difficult, but the one most defined as ‘difficult mode’ (Perennial Tactics) I found pretty easy, when my runs consisted of going with whatever spirit I happened to roll into first.

- Build Difference: While the different spirits have different benefits, the main build difference is mainly controlled by three archetypes of whether you mainly use your attack, launcher, or bolt. Which all the boons really do is make minor differences in adjusting how you use them. Yamphas (water) for one, focuses on wall damage from launching, while Navolik (lightning) will have you be more aggressive with attacks since you can move and attack faster.

An amazing JRPG that combines both the classic RPG adventure feel with the style of the monster hunter games. While it’s not much towards genre-defining, it’s quite fun to watch as you get stronger and stronger and learn new combos, not to mention all the fun little lore tidbits hidden in the journal.

I'll rate Granblue Fantasy: Relink a 8.9/10

- Story/Characters: While the story isn’t the most grand thing, it’s definitely at least a ‘good’ part of the game. The game’s main story isn’t that complicated, and the lore is essentially all from the parent franchise, Granblue Fantasy, but you in no way need to know anything about it before playing, as the only thing I knew was that it exists. The main cast’s presence in the story and all the character’s side stories each provide enough to their own background to help you know them.
- Graphics: Not much to say here, the graphics are pretty great for the anime aesthetic, models and environments all look good and cutscenes are pretty great.
- Price: If you plan to buy this game, beat the story, and then put it down then it’s way overpriced. But that’s clearly not the intent of the game, so with everything you’ll get from it, it’s honestly pretty cheap. It took me 100 hours and quite a bit of luck to get all the steam achievements, I still only have about a third of the in-game ones.
- Combat: Unlike the monster hunter franchise of which the core gameplay loop primarily borrows from, in here you’ve got each character with 4 attacks chosen by you from a pool of about 8-10 if I remember correctly, not to mention all your equips from sigils to weapon (mainly just the traits associated with each one) determine how each character would be built, so there’s lots of freedom in how you want to play, and all of the skills come together excellently to deliver a smooth flow of combat, whether it’s against hordes of fodder enemies or devastating bosses.

- Difficulty: While there are some difficulty settings, those only apply to the main story levels, which will account for maybe a fourth of your playtime, but most likely even less. Outside of that there’s no real difficulty settings besides the regular scaling as you fight stronger and more complex enemies in harder quests, which is good but I feel like it’s a pretty big adjustment considering you just spent 20 hours being able to freely adjust to your liking.
- Character Building: Probably the worst part of the game, but not that bad. For the majority of the quests, you only need to play them once before you get to move up a difficulty, but around the last dozen that’s when the ‘fun’ grind comes in of repeatedly playing them in hopes of getting the exact equip or material you’re looking for. It doesn’t help that the three post-launch characters added vastly outclass all the others (mostly) in terms of DPS, characters that you only get the materials to recruit in endgame.
- Completion Experience: Overall the completion is pretty simple, it’s just playing the game already. There’s a collectible you need to look out for during the story, but the main reason why this is at most in neutral is because, while you’ll likely get them while playing the game, you need to get every single item at least once (including characters and weapons) and you need to go back and beat the whole story again on Ultimate difficulty, which essentially cranks the boss fights up to the difficulty of the right-before-endgame quests.

No major downsides.

While it leans more on puzzle rather than tactical RPG like it may look, it still does a sufficient job to both while keeping its own identity. A short and sweet game that I highly recommend for everyone to play.

I'll rate Tactical Breach Wizards a 9.4/10

- Characters/Dialogue: One of the best parts of the game, despite the limited cast all together, they all mesh so well together, have defined personalities, and even get a good amount of character development. And by that, I mean all of them, not just the ones you play as. There’s just so many great interactions between everyone and it’s one of the best parts of the game.
- Graphics: For a game like this, the graphics work just well enough for everything to be amazing. The special effects of everything are perfect in the style and honestly the character designs are some of the most stand out I’ve seen recently.
- Price: For a game of this quality, for the amount of time you get out of it as well it’s more than worth the full price.
- Gameplay: Like I said in the intro, while being advertised as a tactics game, with the smaller size of the levels, vastly more importance on positioning than any other tactics games I’ve played, and the fact that you can just rewind time honestly points it more to a puzzle game, especially with the confidence goals you can go for to unlock costumes. There’s still multiple ‘solutions’ to every level though so you’re free to ♥♥♥♥ around and find out as much as you want.
- Completion Experience: Honestly it’s pretty easy, about half of the achievements are from the story and the other half are from fun (or challenging) things you can do in specific levels, like beating them in one turn, unique kill ways, and my favorite, defenestration.
- Difficulty: Given the nature of the game, the fact that for difficulty you can freely customize between some options consisting of things like actions per turn and enemy reinforcement delay (or hastening), you’re free to customize combat to your liking.

- Story: The story is honestly kind of meh. On the good side though, the game answers most of the big questions that arise throughout the story. However there’s still not really any explanation to why the world of the game has stuff like this. That part doesn’t really matter though because it’s hilarious.
- Character Upgrading: As you level up characters throughout the story, they’ll gain exp to level up which will grant perk points. While this sounds good, there is a max and you don’t get enough for all the perks. Additionally, you only get a limited amount of perk resets per game, so consider or even look up what perks would be best if you want to make the most. Or don’t, I don’t really care that much.

- Minor Note about Completion: (Feel free to ignore this) While as I’m writing this there’s a QoL patch in beta that fixes the issues I’m talking about, I think it’s still worth to note in case I finish writing this and you read it before that patch goes fully live. To start, there’s a missable achievement in the first level - the only one that you can’t replay - and if you miss it, the only way to get it is to start a brand new save entirely. Additionally, on the main menu, there’s a ‘mission select’ option, please note that the actual mission select is in your save, and the one on the main menu is to essentially ‘reset my save to this point’. Both are likely to be fixed but again, I thought it was worth note depending on when this gets published.

If there’s anything you have questions about or things that you want to know that I didn’t mention, feel free to comment and I’ll try my best to respond as soon as I can.

Short but sweet is the simplest way to describe this game. It’s got an above average story, paired with pretty fun combat and amazing graphics. Unfortunately, it’s pretty quick to play through, a full completion coming to around 15 hours, and not really much longer in challenge mode to grind bolts for Omega weapons if you want to do that (because of bolt multipliers combined with gold bolt no. 23).

- Graphics: The true highlight of the game. While it’s not anything on the level of hyper-realism, the effects used are so incredibly thought out. The character models are highly detailed and every world has their own thematic architecture, and not to mention all the rifts. The use of them is perfectly seamless and so stunning.
- Story/Characters: While it’s not the best story, arguably the short length of it allows for it to still be pretty decent. All plot points don’t take longer than they need to and each have their own clear objectives to keep things moving. While on the other side, the short length doesn’t give each individual character besides the main four their time to shine.
- Combat: While on the surface the combat is all the same - endlessly shooting guns, when you actually play it you see the differences in each type and weapon and how they affect how you play around the enemies. Even besides some of the more basic guns you’ve got minions, bombs, lasers, even a shield, and that’s not to mention the upgrade every weapon gets once you level it to 5.
- Completion Experience: As mentioned several times before, the game to completion is pretty short, which on its own is one thing, but what makes this so interesting is how to get 100% achievements, you can very easily spend only 10 hours. Almost none of the collectibles need to be all found, most of them only need around a third of their total amounts. Besides that, the majority of the achievements are achieved from the story or will likely be obtained during it.

- Difficulty: Pretty standard difficulty settings of PlayStation games, increasing aggressiveness, damage, and health, as well as having the no death mode.
- Exploration: While the collectibles are few in number, except for one planet, the majority of the maps are largely linear, with most of the collectibles being found on ‘that one small offshoot from the path’. While it’s definitely nice to see something so casual, I wish there was a bit more substance to them.

- Price: Now as the big one, there is no way they are asking for a reasonable price for this game. While the quality is good, there’s no real reason that the base price should be 4-6x the expected time you’ll get from the game. Even when it goes on sale, it hasn’t even dipped to half off yet, which is a bit ridiculous for a year-old PC port of a game that’s already three years old total.

The story itself is pretty good with some memorable characters, which I truly think is the main reason to play the game. Other than that though, there aren’t really many overwhelmingly strong points.

- Story/Characters: The main highlight of the game. It’s hard to get into literally anything without spoilers but it’s a worthwhile journey with actual character development. Speaking of characters, the game decides to instead of having a bunch of people slotted in that no one cares about, it whittles it down to a few so you can build meaningful relations with them. Not to mention the setup for an easy sequel to be (and was) created.
- Graphics: It’s really simple - looks great. The differing environments of the realms and Midgard, varying enemy designs and the environments, and don’t even get me started on the ‘big friends’. How nice the game looks and how despite everything having the same general theme of ‘It’s a cold place with Norse mythology’, there’s enough differentiation to keep you engaged.

- Price: A bit overpriced for how much time you’ll get on average, but $50 for what easily could have been priced at 60 like other AAA games is nice.
- Combat: The combat can really be as simple or complex as you like, with all the different skills for combos and effects from gear, you can pull off some crazy combos. Which falls a bit flat however when you realize it’s not that much more effective than just spamming your light and heavy attacks (+block/parry and dodging, of course) but takes a hell of a lot more effort and strategy.
- Difficulty: This is kind of the same thing as Combat, but also kind of different. While the difficulty settings themselves honestly affect the game a bit too much, you can also just stack a ♥♥♥♥ ton of one stat and either be a killing machine (Strength/Runic/Cooldown) or unkillable (Defense/Vitality).
- Exploration: Exploration itself isn’t as bad of a grind as the completion experience is, as doing a bit of exploration on the side can get you a few new attacks and at the start materials to upgrade your gear, but overall it’s still hindered by the things mentioned in the cons section.

- Completion Experience: It’s essentially just walking around for 15-20 hours grabbing collectibles. There are side quests technically, but they’re few and far between so it’s mostly just completing mediocre puzzles for a while, with most of the rewards for collectibles being just EXP, which you’ve likely already used enough of to have everything maxed, or some materials that are already in abundance
- The Map: This ties in to completion experience really, because it’s essentially a non-issue with how linear the game is, but for completion it is just absolutely useless, the only thing it’s good for is counting collectibles, of which there are a lot of. It looks great, yeah, but has almost no functionality besides a “yeah you’re in that general area I think”

An actual masterpiece of a game, 10/10. The themes of the game are so well-represented, especially that of mortality, and the story is absolutely beautiful. Not to even mention the addicting daily life, social links, and Persona collecting of the Persona games. I fully recommend everyone buy and play this, even if it's not on sale at all.

- Story: Like I said earlier, the story is beautiful. It’s hard to talk about anything without spoilers, but there’s just such an incredible amount of detail and heavy-hitting moments put into the plot. If you want to play the game only for combat, please stick around and read the story, it’s worth it.
- Characters: The characters are such a big part of why I believe this game to be so great. Every single one you meet whether it’s a Persona-user or a regular person as a social link, everyone has their own storylines, growth & development, and when you take into account that what you do each day is your decision, the growth feels that much more rewarding because when they get there is up to you. This also ties into spoilers pretty heavily so I can’t give specific examples, but remember to prioritize your social stats first.
- Combat: The combat is pretty standard for turn-based JRPGs, but other than that they’ve also got mechanics such as the One-More/Shifting, All-Out Attacks, and Theurgy attacks, but the adaptability of the main character is determined entirely by the player as all of their skills are decided by what Personas you as the player fuse, which allows you create some of the most insane combinations of skills, passives, and buffs. Your party members, which you also have full control of, can have their skill layout determined by you by selecting which of their abilities they learn. Really fun to determine which team comps you want to use and how to play out the major battles.
- Graphics: All the models, animations, UI, and environments look beautiful and dazzling. It’s honestly hard to express it. While it’s not hyper-realistic as some games aspire to be now, like the other persona games, this has its own identity, and looks great everywhere from the Tartarus tower to the social link rank-up screen.
- Price: The $70 is 100% worth it for both the quality of the game and the length of play, and the best part is that if you aren’t in a situation where you can spend that much, it’s already gone 30% off not too long after release.
- Completion Experience: While if you aim to get all the achievements on your first playthrough, you’ll likely need a guide, since the game operates on a calendar, no extra time is needed after you beat the story (unless you need to go into NG+ of course), and every action during your stay in the game works towards that completion. So nothing is too bad.

- Tartarus (Dungeons): While the Tartarus tower can be kind of same-y after some time, it’s broken up by the vastly different designs of each ‘block’, the stronger boss enemies every few floors or so, plus there’s also Shuffle Time that can be triggered after battle to get extra rewards, which are honestly all pretty good rewards. (Shoutout to the best major arcana cards Justice, Devil, & Star)
- Difficulty: The game is just plain easy, honestly. In the beginning it can be a bit annoying to keep going (mainly because SP runs out so quickly), but once you gain access to some higher-leveled personas and more skills via fusion and leveling up, it becomes almost laughably easy. Even the ‘hardest’ fights (ex. The Reaper & the final boss) become a breeze with the skills that deal heavy/severe/massive damage and the main character’s final Theurgy.

None :)

An overall pretty solid JRPG that presents a massive world to explore and 8 overall solid stories (some better than others - by a lot) about 8 different people living their lives in that world. It’s hard. Although I really don’t recommend going for all achievements unless you particularly like alt-tabbing once a minute. There’s no major flaws to take note of, but there are quite a few minor ones that build up. I do recommend the game, it’s great, but there’s just a few things that were a bit more than ‘minor’ annoyances.

- Stories/Characters: The eight characters presented each have their own 4-chapter story to play through, which while the majority of are pretty good, you’ve got a few breakout hits (namely Therion & Olberic), and some that… exist (*cough* Alfyn), each explore their character’s journey through the circumstances that have found them and how they grow. The only real complaint is that the stories don’t interact at all. The only notion that you are in fact playing a game with 8 people in it is the initial introductions in which they go “would you join/help me on this quest?” and the end when they all have slight mentions to the superboss. There’s also some ‘travel banter’ that occasionally pops up during the chapters that help flesh out the characters more, but it’s pretty minor.
- Combat: The classic JRPG combat system of weapon attacks, magic, buffs/debuffs, works excellently in tandem with the break and boost systems that allow you to manipulate turns to a great degree to be able to dish out insane damage on most turns. While each character has their own strengths & weaknesses, you’ve also got the semi-classic job switching systems where you can get secondary jobs on your characters, which not only increase possibilities, but there’s also some extra jobs you can unlock which are frankly just overpowered as hell, namely Warmaster. Either way, everything available makes it so that you can either just blast your way through or strategize to immense degrees.
- Graphics: Square Enix’s ‘HD-2D’ fits in so fantastically well with the game’s environments and lighting. Not to mention the fact that everything is low-poly means that the game only takes a few gigabytes to install despite the large amount of content.
- Exploration: Despite how the majority of areas are essentially straight lines to the next city, there is some deviation for the odd treasure chest or optional dungeon. Besides when you’re getting the characters at the start, there’s no level scaling either, so you’re free to explore higher or lower leveled areas to get new items or more/less(?) exp.
- Price: I mean, there’s really not much to say here, even with its flaws, you can get ~100 hours of content for $60 ($30 on sale).

- Completion Experience: The thing that makes this such an insane thing to 100% complete is that there is absolutely no way to track anything. You need to reveal the weaknesses of every single enemy, in which some of them are missable, which has to be manually tracked for all 381 unless you want to do some re-checking. Same situation with collecting all hidden items (152) and all treasure chests (734). Of course, collecting all items is technically trackable as you can just compare a list to your inventory, but that is just 1 of 4 and you still have to comb through it all. Now to top all of this off, you also have to do an entire new playthrough (or more) in which you have to complete [starter character’s 4 chapters] with only every recruiting 1 character (your starter), and another for completing [starter character’s 4 chapters] in under 8 hours. As you might guess, all of this most definitely needs a guide and would be best to start from the beginning. Won’t link any here as essentially the first links from just looking it up should have all the exorbitant amounts of info needed.

- Difficulty: A key thing to note here is that there are no difficulty options, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but what’s wrong with this is that for almost the entire game, including the 8-fight boss rush before the superboss, can just be absolutely wiped with minimal strategy. Then the game takes a massive flip where the first phase of the superboss has over 3x the health of the highest health bosses in the game (the ones in the boss rush right before) and is *entirely immune* to any and all damage at several points in the fight. Did I mention that there’s also another super strong phase after that and if you lose you have to do that entire boss rush again? Anyways, it’s a slog to get through and a chore to plan for, but it is beatable, unfortunately.
- Annoyances: (1) Something I personally found to be one of the most annoying things in the game is that you can’t quickswap gear. If someone has something equipped, you can’t select it on the new character and confirm ‘yes, switch’, you need to unequip it on the original character first. Now this doesn’t seem so bad, but you can only ever have 4 out of 8 people in your party at once, which means if you want to equip something that an inactive party member has, you need to go all the way back to a tavern, swap them in, unequip it, swap them back out, and then equip on new character. (2) The way to access the superboss is literally never mentioned or hinted at in any way in the entire game. Sure, the concluding dialogue of each character’s stories hints at something more, but in order to access the superboss, you need to complete ~10 quests I think (which also aren’t clear in what they want you to do). Only then can you even attempt the fun boss I talked about before. (3) This one is extremely minor, but for like the first 2/3 of the game, the struggle for JP is real. I understand that you shouldn’t be able to get all the skills in the beginning, but considering that you can access secondary jobs like 1/4 of the way through, unlocking new skills wasn’t a fun grind for a while.

The tale of two worlds in Tales of Arise isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it’s also not something to look past either. An overall pretty solid game with high scores across the board except for a few things that bring it down at certain points.

- Combat: The combat is overall solid as despite the small cast of playable characters (6), there’s an archetype to each character, so you’re able to play whichever you’d like. While the core of the combat relies on essentially either perfect dodges for counterattacks as a melee character or skill spam in the back for the ranged characters, each one managed to find their own footing. Besides the individual combat, there’s also the Boost Attacks each character has, which charge up over time in battle and can be used to stop an enemy’s attack, of which each has their own specialty. The Boost Strikes, however, despite how powerful they are, are only really ever available to the player as a ‘finishing move’ on an enemy, thus not doing that much throughout the game. The only annoying caveat of the combat system is how most healing skills require ‘CP’ to use, a resource that can only be replenished by resting or using certain items, and sometimes, this can run out quickly.
- Graphics: One of the highest points of the game in my opinion. The game looks great in all aspects, character designs, environments, special effects, it’s all got it’s own theme and really pushes towards it, whether it’s something vibrant and full of life or ominous and foreboding. There were legitimately several points in the game where I just had to pause and look around the area to see the detail put into the basic walls of an area, and this applies to everything in the game, no matter when you get there.
- Exploration: The game is quite large, and despite that, it doesn’t feel overly packed. The game is very linear, to be clear. The most you’ll find off the main quest’s path is maybe an area or two, a subquest here and there, but mostly it’s just items, which also aren’t just spammed everywhere, and given how expensive bulk buying can be sometimes, it’s worth the pickup. Either way, the only real negative about the exploration is that sometimes the game will lock your fast travel due to story reasons, which personally is something I hate. Even though I wasn't planning on going anywhere, the moment I find out I can’t just so happens to be the same moment I remember I need to run back somewhere for something.
- Characters: Honestly the game is pretty good on this aspect, not only do the main characters noticeably change through the story, some of them to a sizeable degree too, but even some of the side characters that are really only relevant in their areas go through some changes when returned to later on. Despite all that though, they can get annoying sometimes, personally I was fed up with Rinwell towards the last quarter of the game (ex. Getting mad at Law for doing literally anything in some of the later skits).
- Price: The game is 100% worth the price *if you were to just get the base game and nothing else*. Almost everything else is severely overpriced. I’ll talk more about those in the DLC-related sections further down, but the base game itself is highly worth the price. Especially with the fact that it now goes on sale for $15, even if you end up shelving it, it’s not too much of a loss.
- Completion Experience: To start off, any game without missable or difficulty-related achievements is already a pretty good completion, but combined with how the majority of the achievements will be gotten through just beating the story, and you’ve got a pretty good 100%. Beside that, though, there aren’t a lot of other things to worry about. The game has built-in counters (not trackers) for things such as owls found, quests completed, skits viewed, etc, so you don’t need to worry about keeping explicit counts of what you’ve done since most you don’t need to worry about. Lastly, of course, the final completion time (for the base game) came in at around 50 hours for me, using a guide for collectibles so I didn’t have to backtrack at the end.

- Story/Lore: While the story isn’t exactly bad, it’s not the best. There’s quite a few clichés throughout. It does have a pretty good point where you think the game is getting somewhat close to the end, and then it goes haha, off to Lenegis. The skits mostly provide interesting looks into what the characters are thinking beyond what is told during cutscenes, but the fact they’re all told in a visual novel-esque style is a bit sad.
- Beyond the Dawn Expansion: The DLC is absolutely not worth the price. A base ask of $30 will get you about 10 hours of content (all achievements), which consists of a new story, 1 new weapon for each character (which is quite literally unlocked at the end of the story), and new skits and subquests. That’s it. No new characters, outfits, title skills, etc.. The worst part of all though, is that there is no transfer between the base game and the expansion. The most you get is some bonus items (gald, SP, and a barely-better weapon) for essentially 100%ing the base game. That’s right, you have to re-acquire all your skills, equipment, artifacts, even fast travel points, because the map has been changed ever so slightly. Now this all sounds terrible, so I’m sure you’re wondering why it’s not in the cons category. The reason is pretty simple, it’s just plain alright. The story is pretty decent, but it ends in the most cliché thing of all, the power of friendship, but the lead-up is nice. As mentioned with the other DLC, you should absolutely wait for a sale to get it.

- Difficulty: The game’s difficulty is way out of control. No standard enemy fight will ever cause you trouble. Ever. Meanwhile, the first two bosses of the game are incredibly difficult compared to your knowledge, experience, and stats at the time you fight them. The thing that opposes this the most is though, that after that, everything, bosses included, is ridiculously easy. Of course, you can’t overwhelm an immense level gap in the nature of RPGs, but the threat of bosses becomes almost non-existent as you gain certain skills. There are of course higher difficulties, but all that really does is make the fights take longer because of more HP.
- Manufactured Demand (DLC): A very, very, notable con for the game is the manufactured demand. That is, selling the solution to the problems they created. The minor issues this affects is the grindy nature of RPGs, leveling, points to unlock skills, money/material farming, etc. All of these, of course, are conveniently sold as DLC. For example, you can purchase a combined 40 levels (note: does not increase the level cap, just levels you up) for a combined US$13.94. The most major affectant though, is how the base game cap on consumables is 15. Conveniently enough, there’s an artifact that increases that cap to 99 for only one $4.99 DLC. This is a very annoying issue, but it can be ignored. Absolutely wait for a sale if you’re going to buy any DLC though.

- New Game +: Standard New Game + features, however, a very important thing to note is that all your things DO NOT carry over by default. Finding the extra owls and beating a post-game quest rewards you with the items that allow you carry over essentially everything, but again, not be default.

A great send-off to the Secret trilogy and to Ryza herself. While there’s certainly things that could have been improved, overall it’s a culmination of everything that made the first two great with brand new things packed in as well.
With the current sale for Lunar New Year going on I’d recommend picking it up, moreso if you’ve played the first two (and if you haven’t, they’re also on sale and I have reviews out for them too), but really it’s just a nice finale to the series and something I could see myself coming back to in the future.

- Alchemy: The alchemy has been expanded upon in some ways, but also reduced in others. To start off, all the systems you’ve come to know and love are unlockable from the start, just locked behind a decent chunk of SP in the skill tree. This includes but is not limited to Item Rebuilding, Rebuild Levels, and Item Duplication. Unfortunately the Essences from Ryza 2 do not make a return, but that’s nothing major. Ryza 3 prefers to have you hit the ground running, with a ton of recipes unlocked from the start and not a lot of recipes unlocked by morphing, most of them are unlocked from the skill tree. Honestly I much prefer this method as it essentially means as long as you have the materials. The super traits system is a cool new take on the traits system. Basically, sometimes the materials near a landmark will be special and have a super trait, which can be transferred to your items upon synthesis. These have honestly just an incredible amount of range of what they can do, but they’re very powerful.
- Combat: The real-time turn-based combat returns yet again, but this time it’s better than ever. The combat in Ryza 3 essentially expands upon Ryza 2’s system. You’ve got 3 on-fielders and 2 back-liners (up from 1 in Ryza 2 and 0 in Ryza 1), which can swap in at any time after a cooldown.You’ve got the skill chains, action orders, core items (in which they’ve changed the Core Crystal upgrade system to be several upgrades of miscellaneous types instead of just 5 general upgrades), and the new key system, which can be used in battle as well, which I’ll cover in another section because the keys are used in several parts of the game.
- Graphics: The graphics (and performance) continue to get better with every installment. Not much to say here really, all the environments and models look great, each area really has it’s own theme.
- Difficulty: Ryza 3 is almost definitely the easiest game of the three to ‘break’. The new super traits system as well as almost full freedom very quickly allows you to get overpowered gear and items FAST. Not to mention you can get ‘infinite’ gems and complete the skill tree in record time. The difficulty options are nice to have, but with just a bit of planning I was using like 4 items to bully every enemy and boss even on the hardest difficulty I was able to select.
- Price: Not that bad, honestly. A full playthrough will bring you pretty close to the $1:1 hour ratio that is the ‘goal’, and the missing parts of that are easily made up for with the quality of content in the game.

- Story/Lore: The story continues a year after Ryza 2 as a mysterious set of islands have appeared near Kurken Island, so you’d think that the majority of the game would be investigating these islands. Wrong. The archipelago is actually pretty small and you explore the whole area pretty quickly into the game, with only one thing at the end of your look around that leaves you with questions. Ryza and co. then travel through a few areas in search of a single thing. Yeah, one thing, that they aren’t even sure what exactly it is. It feels like they kind of forgot what they were doing in the first place. I will say, however, that the plot itself is pretty good, but it just kind of forgets where it’s going sometimes. There’s a lot of areas left unexplored or even mentioned in the story, which is backed up by some World Quests and Character Quests, which does help fill in the world a bit more. Overall I wouldn’t say it’s a bad story, but again, it really just forgets what the goal is sometimes, and really only gets back to the original plan about two-thirds through.
- Secret Keys: Here it is, the title of the game, the Secret Keys. Keys are created via either a Hollow (bad) or Pristine (good) key at landmarks (your fast travel waypoints in this game), and have a randomized set of effects that apply to numerous parts of the game. You can equip certain keys as Symbols to your characters which can provide stat boosts or change their role (which provides a special buff), activate them in the open world to increase gathering quality/quantity or open locked doors to get to chests, use (or create) them mid-battle via Key Modification (or Key Creation), which lets you infinitely combo basic attacks to gain massive amounts of AP to use your skills for a limited item, and most importantly use them during Synthesis to get some extra buffs on your gear. Now this all sounds great, doesn’t it? Well the thing is - I didn’t really use the keys that much. Outside of the story progression, occasional time I ended up in front of a locked door, or some party quests or tricky fights to use keys in battle or synthesis, there wasn’t any time I thought to myself ‘Ah! I should use a key’ Maybe when you play you’ll do something more worthwhile with them but to me it was a bit of a let-down how much the game hyped them up with all the tutorials just for them to not really stand out.
- Completion Experience: Overall the completion is pretty easy, but there are a few things that can trip you up, such as manifesting all roles or completing the requests of the sword master brothers. Nothing is missable except maybe for a glitch I heard about, see here. At the very end of your completion journey there’s just gonna be those few achievements so I recommend using the Barrel Wisdom site[barrelwisdom.com] to clear up any confusion.

- Exploration: Honestly, exploration is the biggest downside about the game for me. Ryza 3 is semi-open world (as opposed to segmented open world like the first two), as in you can travel across the entire map without a single loading screen, but the map also isn’t just a giant circle, it’s essentially a bunch of linear paths with a few large open areas every so often. Combine this with the fact that the map is so large, having not only the entirety of the Ryza 1 map, but also 3 entirely new regions (and even a part of Ryza 2’s map in a free DLC), which means they have to spread materials out more, which means that most of the areas you’ll almost never return to save for when there’s a quest objective to go there or you need one material you managed to miss the first time around. The fact that it’s open world also doesn’t help with locating items, as when you try and find it in the in-game guide, it just tells you the landmark it’s closest to, which can be a pretty large area with a few different climates, so I ended up resorting to YouTube or GameFAQs for other people’s documentation of item locations.
- Characters: Characters are overall pretty good, and you’ve got a total of 11 party members to pick from, which is absurd. But really the reason this is in cons is kind of just a nitpick, but Clifford and Serri from Ryza 2 are the only characters out of all of Ryza’s companions to not be present in this game, which as a huge Clifford/Serri fan, I find quite offensive.

<Section shortened because hitting character limit lol>
- KBM vs. Controller: TL;DR Keyboard controls didn’t look bad the few times I accidentally went to them.
- New Game +: TL;DR Same NG+ system as previous two games, except only 2 new difficulties.