Recent reviews by yokai

kirtu is the grey yakuza...

This game is fun, but appears to suffer from some funky networking issues that causes stuttering

Red Dead Redemption 2 sets the bar extremely high for the entire games industry - including Rockstar themselves. Having the main focus be on one character, Arthur, really strengthens the narrative and helps keep the focus as well as a coherent story line.

I really enjoyed my time in the late, almost over wild west of 1899 and I would say this is in my top 5 games of all time.

Winter Resort + Ducks. What's not to love?

A buggy mess. Do anything other than play the game and it crashes to desktop with no message. Seems very little modification was done to the Source Engine to actually get this stable, the RTX stuff was just grafted on, as when the program hangs (randomly when booting and sometimes other times too) it says 'hl2.exe has stopped responding' 💀.

I was able to play the game from start to finish fairly easily, I'm not a speed runner and Portal is not a long game but it took around 1 hour and 30 minutes (after oooing and ahhing at the new lighting effects I played it quickly as I've played the original several time), plus an extra 30 minutes to fight the random crashes and getting the performance somewhat tolerable.

Speaking of performance, at 1080p on a 3070, I was getting around 50fps. Not unplayable by any means, but this is a serious regression of performance. I hope that it's just down to the 2006 engine trying desperately to keep up, but as a tech demo that's supposed to get me excited for the future of video game graphics technology it falls flat on it's face.

This was my first real interaction with real time ray-tracing in a video game (I have dabbled with the Minecraft RTX mod for a while, but for maximum 30 mins). I am incredibility disappointed. I feel a lot of the lighting effects could be achieved the same way (or even better) through pre-rendered baking in ray-tracing. I feel like this is a serious regression and not progress. Yes it looks pretty, but for a system that supposedly has core on-board specifically for the purpose of raytracing, this is really disappointing.

However, one thing that I was charmed at was the real time lighting - which I suppose is one of the selling points of RTX. The chamber with the first energy ball was quite pretty in my opinion, and when I noticed the lighting coming through portals I was rather delighted. However, I do not honestly think that it's worth the real and serious performance impact.

Perhaps it's personal preference, but I feel like if this is the future of gaming then it's not for me. The small improvements in lighting (yes, massive improvements over the original game, but by modern lighting I don't feel like it's that much better) are not worth the performance hit, and thus price of the hardware to run such effects.

Going forward, I hope that ray-tracing stays as an optional effect in video games instead of being the only option. But maybe that increases the development time of new games, having to consider two different lighting systems, I don't know I'm not a game developer. But I really feel 90% of the effects can be recreated with pre-baked lights and the rest of the effects be ray-traced. Maybe I just don't understand this technology at all, so all I'm doing is yelling at a cloud, but it's still not ready for the main stream yet. Maybe by the next console generation, but not today. Not at 'affordable' prices.

I'd love to see how this runs on an Xbox or a PlayStation to compare the performance of PC (specifically my 3070) against consoles.

Yeah it's pretty fun

yeah it's good, i like scotland and i'm from the uk so the roads feel familiar. probably won't get 5 because i don't want to go to brazil

baba booey

Quick review post final boss:
Finished the game to the final final boss, Really enjoyed it, and wish I had to patience to 100% it but I have other games I want to play (and then once those are done I'll be moving on with my life and walking away from video games for a while).

Thanks Square Enix, you make great games and am looking forward to NieR Replicant later on this year


Original Review:


I played the original almost all the way to the end (couldn't be bother with the final bit of grind) and I can assure this is an excellent and exciting game (though maybe I'm just simple, it's a rather simple story!)

The graphics are nice, however they are not any better than the original. New features include 2D mode, seeing your party in the overworld, Japanese voice lines, fully orchestrated OST and a lot of other quality of life improvements (such as Photo Mode as opposed to the first person mode in the original).

THERE IS A FAIR BIT OF GRIND, THE ORIGINAL TOOK ME OVER 60 HOURS TO FINISH Please keep that in mind when going into this.

Is it worth base price or should I wait for sale? That's a tricky one. I honestly think that this should have been a £7 DLC update for the original so I'm a bit miffed that I had to buy again (still bought tho) so it's up to you. Really comes down to one question: did you play the original?. If yes: WAIT UNTIL A SALE. From what I understand it's the same story as the original and this only provides quality of life improvements. If no: IT'S UP TO YOU. I usually wait for sales anyway, but if you're looking for something other than an FPS game to play this Christmas, and Cyberpunk 2077 is out of your budget, this is certain worth the price - at a 60 hour 3 part campaign I think you more than enough get your money's worth for £30.


I've written a more in-depth guide to getting it to work that also includes a compatibility report, check it out here: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2308952690

Use Proton-5.21-GE-1 - with this the game booted, initialised a save, played the introductory cut scene and booted into the 3D game engine with no issues on max settings.

THINGS I HAVEN'T TESTED:

Gamepad
• Completing the game (I want to enjoy it so it's gonna take 60 hours)
  
• Changing the language
  
• Changing the music
  
• Getting past the tutorial (I just wanted to make sure I could play this later)
  
• Getting new party members
  
• 2D mode

Basically I'm at the point of the first battle with the initial 3 slimes. Given my experience with other games and the original version of this game, once you actually get into in-game engine you should be fine (this game is fairly un-intensive so there isn't much to worry about in terms of graphical artefacts)

All in all, this game seems to run just fine under Linux (with Proton) and I look forward to playing this again over Christmas. If you are having issues, please:

• Update your system (including drivers if you are using propitiatory)
  
• Update to Proton-5.21-GE-1
  
• Ensure Steam is up to date
  
• Ensure that the Steam Runtime Library is up to date
  
• Check the integrity of the game's files

Have fun playing DQXI, it's a great game!

I have yet to complete this game since the Xen and Definitive edition launches, but from my impressions of the beta it was really good so these new updates should take what was a great game and make it excellent