Recent reviews by Nightmarian

Dunno what else to say other than it's exactly what it seems, Fantasy Persona with actual evolution and iteration of the famous Atlus sauce and IMO that will help the next SMT and Persona games too.

Frankly though, Metaphor is now my favorite Atlus IP alongside Digital Devil Saga. It's such an interesting setting even without being a huge fantasy stan, and though their games have always been fantastical and crazy-leaning (Mind Palaces, a high school turning into Tartarus, demon multiverses, uh... the secret of what the Digital Devil Saga world really is), with the leeway from no longer needing to pretend their game has a believable modern world tied to something insane, Atlus just went full rabid pycho in the best way possible.

And boy is some of the stuff just out there lol. Overall, a super fun and beautiful game with a IMO better use of the PErsona calendar systems. Using the not-persona Archetypes as a job system is also extremely cool and fun, as I feel job systems are dying out and I really, really love them. This basically lets you choose your favorite characters yet build them into your own preferred team.

A lot of the general production value is also amazing. Great voice acting, glorious music, awesome menu style.

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect. The game looks like a remastered PS3 game and graphical options are sparse. That's not a deal breaker for me--I play a ton of retro games today still and adore them--but it is a fair point to criticize. This isn't a $40 AA game, but a $70 AAA game that is also ripping you off on dlc and special editions.

Performance can also be a bit spotty and you don't have a whole lot of options to tune graphical settings. Overall, a fantasy game if you're into RPGs and especially if you enjoy JRPGs.

This is definitely going to be the highlight RPG of the year, and alongside Nine Sols, so far it's my favorite game experience.

Holy flying ♥♥♥♥. What. A. Game. At first glance, I had dismissed it, but all the glowing reviews and comparisons to one of my favorite meterovanias, Hollow Knight, made me decide to buy it.

And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You need to play this game. NEED TO.

This game is not "like Hollow Knight." To me, it surpasses it, and it's the Silksong we're not getting this lifetime apparently for me. Comparing it as simply "like Hollow Knight" does this game a MASSIVE disservice.

The reason for that is that it plays very much like a sekiro-seasoned version of Hollow Knight (as opposed to dark souls-seasoned), but does an infinitely better job creating a enthralling setting and panel of characters. Some of the villains you both hate and love, and far too many will break your heart. This is ultimately a depressing story about a species desperately clinging to life as they face extinction and slowly giving up hope as their final gamble falls apart. Some accept it. Some refuse to. Others pretend as if nothing had happened.

The main character, Yi, is also not a silent vessel. What originally seems to be a quest for revenge slowly becomes much much deeper, and you slowly start to understand the motivation driving him. In a lot of ways, Yi is no different than the people he accuses, and you see that clearly through the final messages sent to him by someone very close to him. This character is never truly present, yet is one of the most impactful emotionally speaking, and it was so well done I literally was left speechless. That kind of thing is not hard to do.

This is 10000000% a show not tell masterpiece with every piece fed to you having a high impact. This alone in my opinion shoots it far above Hollow Knight. You will remember almost every single one of these characters, and even though they're not human, their plight is far more human than that of Hollow Knight's bugs, and you really real feel the desperation.

As a game, it's also nearly perfect. Smooth movements, interesting set of skills, fluid gameplay, fantastic music, and good pacing for enemy upgrades and zones. The game also actually makes you use the tools/abilities you learn, unlike many other games.

This is easily my favorite game of the year at the moment, and it is literally a masterpiece.

My ONE complaint however is VERY significant, and that is that there are a lot of poorly designed enemy types and boss fights. To make matters worse, enemies have really tight homing, so if you're even a milisecond off with the timing, dodging behind them will just have the enemy instant-flip and fly to hit you anyway. This can be infuriating and makes some bosses far harder than they need to be.

This isn't a "git gud" situation, as they ARE beatable, it's just a lot less satisfying and enjoyable, and far more tedious, when the game punishes you arbitrarily. If you're behind an sword swing, it should simply miss, period. This cheapens a lot of fights and forces you to play by the devs' arbitrary rules. To make matters worse, they have some truly tedious enemy types that will waste your time. You will quickly learn to just ignore them unless forced to fight them. Mostly the ninja-types that free-dodge attacks and instantly retaliate and the teleporting samurai. They requite a high degree of precision and timing just for the right to hit them, and they're not even bosses. It's just not worth it while you're exploring and with them respawning after you heal.

This is their first souls/sekiro-like though, so I will give them a pass. Hopefully next time they loosen up on bullshiz like that, it's not fun even if you know how to deal with it and that's a lesson FromSoft learned very quickly too.

I know some people were having technical issues, but I was lucky and didn't have any prior to or after using the DVK fix. 120~ FPS average on max setting.

As for the game itself, it is literally Fantasy Persona. Social Links are replaced with I think it's called friendships. Archetypes are Persona and look awesome in their own way though I wished they had some color variety, but maybe we can customize them a little later, lol. Everything combat-related in the TB mode is persona-ified, from how auto attacks use your human while abilities/spells use the Persona-sorry Archetype. There's even an over-the-top awakening scene whenever someone awakens.

And yes, there's even a Velvet Room mirror with a better Igor called More. There are is no attendant but Gallicia the fairy seems to fill that role and after some thought I think this is for the best as she is with you in the normal world from the very start so her character actually gets developed more than attendants normally will and she's a social link as well. Everything else from menu art, turns, music and even enemy design if I'm honest are all very persona-esque. There's even a calendor just like the persona games and you have to manage your time between the political overgame and dungeon crawling!

So, what to say? Well, it's Fantasy Persona. If you like fantasy and you like persona like I do, you will love this game. If you hate fantasy, maybe not, but if you're indifferent and just want a Persona game before Persona 6, this should tide you over.

The world is an interesting mix of interesting worldbuilding and tropey fantasy. A ton of stuff is explained, but I do appreciate that they just mostly keep it in the journal for you to read at whim instead of drowning you in exposition, a common mistake for many first-time fantasy IPs.

Compared to other Persona games, there are some nice quality of life buffs like active combat in the overworld making you earn the advantage and punishing you (sometimes with the infamous instant-kill lockout due to them getting extra turns) if you screw it up. If the enemy is too weak they just die in the overworld unless you force turn-based, siving you a ton of time. Love to see it.

Artistically, everything should be familar to SMT fans. Beautiful music, alien vistas, and a hard lean on style over graphical fidelity. Story-wise, can't say much right now but dialogue is comptent, I've laughed a few times, and it isn't trying to be ridiculous and over-the-top with the fantasy tilt. It's no Final Fantasy level voice-acting and dialogue (wonky as FF stories are, they get their voice actors and the art of dialogue weirdly right a lot. Even badly written FF characters sound great and are a joy to hear talk).

As far as the story goes, I don't think it will be blowing any minds. I'm pretty sure there will be some world-ending event and some god we have to kill with the power of friendship.

For SMT games it's very often the journey that matters most and makes endings like Persona 3 and 4's hit so hard. When Dojima, who only has guesses as to what's going on, breaks down and desperately pleads with you to save his daughter, it is a memorable moment BECAUSE of all the carefree build up to it. And then you get hit with Nanako's dungeon lmao. Here's hoping it's the same. There are some intriguing plot hooks and I want to know more about the world, but so afr the story seems to be pretty generic JRPG in its roots, especially if you're a SMT stan like me and have seen it all.

Worth buying? Well, if they fix the technical issues (or you're not having them) and you are a fan of JRPGs or SMT games, definitely.

I literally don't know any better way to describe it than Fantasy Persona 5.5

Full review here on a steam post I made (it's long, too long to fit here): https://steamoss.com/app/2183900/discussions/0/4763207778568076906/

tl;dr: The game is objectively good. There's just not enough game. At all. You will be done with everything in a week or two, and yes that includes grinding out stuff. The PvP won't last you any longer since there's no real progression and only 3 super simple maps with barebones aesthetics and nothing new coming until 2025.



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Don't want to downplay the issues have been having, but seems to be the most common (and thus lower end) systems that have the biggest issues (which apparently consoles share). I have a 4080 and 5800x and have no issues. No crashes, game loads fine, been playing since it went live without issue and great performance on DLSS (a crutch for sure, but oh well...)

Will update with proper review after game launches so it's not a prelaunch review, should have the game finished by then.

So far it's a perfect 40k game if you want setting fantasy, the actual gameplay itself is pretty generic and so far the story is also generic, but hopefully they actually complete it without cliffhangers this time, lol. Be aware than I really don't think it's worth $60 if the game really is only 6-8 hours long, as it's obviously focused on the MP side, let alone $100. I only paid around $70 for the ultra so eh. Game really should be $40, $60 for ultra, no Gold edition, all preorders get this BS early access.

Do take note of the technical issues though, especially if you are med or low spec, as they seem to be universally commonplace. The COOP is also broken by many accounts. I haven't used it but even on consoles people are struggling to get it to work.

Young Man! Young Man! Young Man! Young Man! Young Man! Young Man!

I love this game. This is classic Atlus at their best with a no-frills traditional JRPG from the days of old. I've been waiting for it for a long time. Yes, I love Persona and this isn't anything like Persona, and I know the difficulty or lighter focus on storytelling isn't for everyone, but for people who missed the word dark pokemon vibes SMT has had for ages, this game comes back to form like a blazing star and offers an incredibly solid JRPG that looks good and feels even better to play.

Vengeance also adds a ton of quality of life features alongside just simply cool features, making it overall a better way to play through the game, and the story is still pretty fantastic. Top notch music as always too.

It lacks the bombastic style of Persona, but that's okay too.

Overall, a very "modernized" classic JRPG that will eat hours away. Highly recommend it if it's what you're looking for.

Oh. Boy. A lot of people don't recommend this game because of technical issues, but say the game is still fun. Yes, it runs like garbage, but if you are lucky enough to have high end gear (I have a 4080) and use performance mods + frame generation DLSS, you will get a steady, 120+fps experience, but that's basically cheating.

As for the 'fun,' I suspect most people probably just wandered off doing random things and basically delayed the main story, which is probably why they had fun. The tl;dr is that this is a decent game if you just care about the idea of being a jedi and don't care about the game's ongoing story or Star Wars in general.


On paper, the game does a lot of stuff right. You can explore a little for fun then beat the game without issues even on higher difficulties and there's no Ubisoft map-vomit. Exploration isn't rewarded especially well, but you do get voice logs (most of which tell you literally nothing, it's just someone going "Oh that's a nice sunrise") as well as little stuff like health upgrades, perks (most of which are worthless), store currencies, and extra skill points, plus the usual torrent of cosmetic junk that becomes redundant once you, BD-1, and your lightsaber look good enough for your tastes.

You can skip it all though if you want and the game doesn't really punish you for it. So this is perfect for most gamers imo. Easily the best part of the game.


Ugh. I think this was always divisive, but though it's technically slightly better than the first's games, it's bit by much. The developers seemed unable to decide between Sekiro-style or traditional souls-borne style combat, because they lean heavily on parrying then fill THE ENTIRE GAME with enemies that do zero-wind-up-time red attacks, which can only be dodged, not parried. 99% have no telegraphs or wind-up and come out in the middle of normal attack chains, or have hyper-fast traversals into grabs, all with hard homing so you have to dodge PERFECTLY on time since it's hard to just move out of the way. Enemies spam them, and not even basic ones flinch, plus mid to high end enemies barely react to force abilities.

This creates a jank combat system where it feels you are a peasant fighting jedi masters instead of the other way around, with you quick stepping back for 10 minutes for a one-swipe opening unless you want to get caught in an immediate red grab spam.

Enemies so variation is bad too, since all bosses are normal enemies sent early and the few unique bosses are used a bunch of times minus 1.


Second worst part of the game. No real spoilers since you learn this five minutes in, but the premise basically boils down to "Oh damn, this game is canon, how are we going to make them not existing during the timeline of the original movies make sense?" And then you proceed to watch them chase meaningless macguffins for ~40 hours to find a way to go off screen—whoops, I mean a hidden planet—never to be seen again.

Let's forget that the entire premise is itself stupid, as it is clearly shown the Empire is aware of maybe not everything, but something going on there important to former jedi, and that koboh already has heavy imperial activity. The one positive here is Cal's development as a person and a more complex jedi. This was done really, really well, and we watch him grapple with guilt, his purpose, and the conflicts tugging him in a billion different directions before ultimately making a very human and not so very jedi choice at the end. Chef's kiss.

I only wish the rest of the crew got the same kind of treatment.

Dagan Gera + Bode are single-handedly the two most important story characters in the game, yet they are positioned lazily and get little development. This is especially problematic for Bode for story reasons, and the game's lazy attempt at trying sympathy with the 'ol "but he's got a whittle little daughter" does literally nothing narratively except make you roll your eyes. Dagan himself is utterly wasted in every regard, and was a crazy cool premise teased in the game's announcement, but ultimately ends up being a throwaway red herring lmao. Ouch.


Yeah, they get their own section because they pissed me off that much. For starters, I want to be perfectly clear that I'm not anti-woke or any of that nonsense. I am a very dark skinned latino myself and grew up with a lot of racism directed at me. Some of my favorite characters in gaming and novels are also women, from Samus to Estelle Bright to Suikoden 5's Lyon, all of which are REAL 'strong women' who have earned their strength and yet are still human and flawed.

These days however, it seems that modern media's concept of a "strong woman" cringey as the term inherently is, is for them to simply be stronger than their fellow males for no reason without doing any work and showing no weaknesses.

We get to SEE Cal EARN his powers and see him STILL fail, get back up, dust himself off, acknowledge his mistake, and then humbly accept the helping hands of his friends while still worrying about them. It is incredibly hard not to root for a hero protagonist like that.

Then we have Cere and Merrin.

Merrin is now more powerful than all the nightsisters combined. Remember, she barely had any role in the war that killed off her people because she was a child and she also had zero combat experience. Yet now, you can't help but raise an eyebrow as she uses the Force in utterly ridiculous ways and fights better than even the greatest jedi masters. Made me wonder how the nightsisters lost if they could all fight like her.

Oh wait, that's because no one but Merrin can do what Merrin does. For a reason that is laughably explained as her taking a break to go back home and learn some vague singular ritual that she immediately mastered.

Cere is even worse. In the first game, she rips herself from the force and stops being a jedi for years, finds Cal but still hides on the ship and lets a padawan do all the dangerous work because, in her own words, her jedi days were behind her, then when she finally uses the force again, she goes straight into the dark side while Vader laughs at her.

BRIEF ENDGAME SPOILERS

In this game, she sticks to pacifically aiding refugees, and still refuses to help Cal. I wasn't even sure she still had her lightsaber. She continues to be useless for 99% of the game, only for you to be forced to control her for a segment that goes on WAAAAAAAAAY too long that ends with you fighting Vader.

And you actually have to fight him. I just let her die because I knew there was 0% chance Cere of all people would ever coming close to killing Vader.

But no, you have to beat him. And it's presented as a close fight, with Vader crying like a baby and limping away after he barely kills Cere with a lucky stab.

The literal flying F? Cere, who ripped her connection from the force, refused to do any fighting, and got her arse utterly whooped by Vader before, suddenly just destroys Vader? See what I mean about how when a character doesn't earn their spotlight, it looks cartoonishly stupid?

So now we have this dumb canon where one of the most terrible fighters in the series now canonically almost killed Vader, womp womp.

End Spoilers

And Disney wonders why people say they ruined Star Wars lmao. Again, I am not against strong female characters, BUT YOU HAVE TO GIVE THEM CHARACTERIZATION AND MAKE THEM EARN IT WHILE ALSO FAILING AND SHOWING THEY ARE HUMAN.

That is not just how you simply make strong female characters right, but GOOD CHARACTERS IN GENERAL.

Despite all this, I grudingly admit it's still a decent game. 5/10. Don't ever pay more than $30 for it and I'd say $20 is about right. Hopefully someone besides EA takes a shot at games like this... Oh wait, Ubisoft is doing it worse.

Sigh.

Feels like they saw what happened with Shadows of Change in Total War Warhammer 3, gulped, and went extra hard on this. I'm pretty sure 90% of the 'free' content update was previously exclusive to the DLC, but regardless together they make quite some nice changes to the game.

After how god awful Empires and Ashes was, especially its new culture option which SHOULD have been the most interesting by far, it's nice to see things turn around with Primal Fury.

Whether it's worth your money or not though will still be a matter of perspective. In terms of raw brand new content, there actually isn't much. A lot of the 'new' stuff is mechanical and/or repurposes preexisting content (i.e. animal units). However, it does so in a way that really adds depth to using them and the game overall. The new culture also looks nice and hey now you have some bew cool bestial races added to the game too, which were long overdue.

While less an 'expansion' and more of a 'this is a huge void missing from the epic fantasy, uh, fantasy, why wasn't it there at release,' I still have to admit it is a worthwhile addition and likely will improve the game depth and versatility a good deal. However, since it basically improves the base game more than adding to it, whether or not you think it's worth money really depends on how much you like the base game and how much you want new things to shake stuff up.

Because shake stuff up this xpac does not. That SHOULD have been Empires and Ashes, which it failed to do unlike the Dragon Dawn expansion. Hopefully the next xpac does better and actually adds a breadth of brand new content to the game.

Either way, for $10, I feel it's overall good value for anything who already enjoys what is here and would like to increase the depth of that gameplay. If you're hoping for completely new toys to change things up, though, give it a pass.

I want to be clear that this is a phenomenal game. Owlcat's best, even, especially since they finally gave up on that broken, janky RtwP system that I never really liked even as a child playing the first IE games. As always, the writing is superb; there is a scene where you travel through a Nurgle-infested ship, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, whoever wrote that must get off to Nurgle because it puts even Black Library authors to shame. This was contrasted by a few areas where I wondered if some young intern with zero knowledge of 40k was trying to fix a setting that is SUPPOSED to be darkly ironic and wholly grim, but thankfully they are few and far between. Still gets a bit annoying seeing "Emperor of Humankind" etc over and over though...

Visually, the game is also superb in that lovingly representive CRPG way. It's no BG3, but it does a fantastic job conveying the setting, especially when it comes to warp stuff. Can't tell you the amount of times I see blood on a painting of someone who dies and frowning, only for it to be gone, or see faces in the metal of a passageway, lmao. Great stuff. The audio design keeps pace. There are no "Children of the Omnissiah" level songs, but it's still damn great.

Where the game fails--as Owlcat always does fail--is in the game design and technical aspects. I seriously don't know why they don't just fire their coders and game designers at this point, and maybe their Q/A team too if the issue isn't that they weren't given enough time. Or maybe finally dump the Unit engine.

Regardless, the game is a buggy mess, as you've no doubt already seen from all the other reviews. In fact, nearly all their "professional" reviews detail a fantastic game hidden underneath a mire of bugs. The worst part of it is that the game is actually fantastic when it works. It's easy to dismiss a bad game that also doesn't work, but in cases like this you feel like a starving man being kept from a steaming plate of food by an electric fence.

It's. So. Damn. Frustrating. Especially after 3 freaking games full of the SAME. EXACT. PROBLEM. Granted, this is nowhere near the disaster Kingmaker was at launch (frankly, I'm shocked they survived that), but there's a stark difference between how Owlcat improved over their last three games and how Larian improved over their last three games, lmao. One of them is a now super famous, popular, and beloved studio praised for their work. The other is not. Guess which is which?

Now, I love Owlcat, because they make more classical CRPGs, and I love those as much as Larian's more unique take on CRPGs. Maybe even moreso. But I don't love them enough to burn out my eyes and see their truth (haha in-game reference). They need to do better. Period. Fullstop. Lengthen the beta period with more patches like Larian did, actually use that feedback to improve the game, take more time to fix stuff, whatever, I don't care, just don't release buggy messes like this.

Anyway, that's everything. The game is definitely a gem in terms of the story and presentation, and if you're a 40k nutjob like me, the game is a wet dream all the way through aside from a few bits of writing where you can clearly tell the writer knew absolutely nothing about 40k (with the contrast being so jarring it's hard to miss).

But christ maybe wait for the "real" release of the game, which is usually their definintive edition.

One of the best games of my childhood and IMO the best Star Ocean game. Also easily one of the more famously beloved JRPGs of the formulative era.

While time has not been kind to the series, this game itself remains a timeless classic and its remaster is exactly how you do it right. Gorgeous new 2.5 HD graphics, rearranged music, new portraits, but all the originals are there too for nostalgia if you really want. On top of that, they crammed the game full of a ton of great modern quality of life features, from a really good fast travel system to stuff like shortcut team healing and icons for events and friendship level tracking.

That would have already made it a top-tier remaster, but to top it all off, they even improved the core gameplay with subtle touchups that respect the game's legacy and don't just boil down to a lazy attempt at making your own completely different ♥♥♥♥-eyed game stuffed within the skin of a beloved identity (Looking at you, Final Fantasy 7R).

These changes include removing random encounters and using visible enemy symbols instead (thank god) and adding a bit more depth to combat via the perfect dodge mechanic and shield system which was implemented pretty well.

Overall, this is imo the definitive edition of one of the best JRPGs of the old age. If you're a modern game that never got a chance to play this, it does show its age but is still leagues better than many of the JRPGs releasing today.

My only complaint is the price, it should really be $40, but that's Square Enix for you, and hey, no epic exclusivity, no Sony timed exclusivity... and a lot of work went into the game. Whoever made the remaster actually cares about Star Ocean in a way Enix does not. So I'll let it slide.

Here's dreaming of the day the Breath of FIre series as well as Legend of Dragoon and Skies of Arcadia get similar remasters... maybe the Grandia games too.

Praying the Suikoden remasters are good too but given how Konfailme did their arguably biggest franchise dirty (Metal Gear Sold), I don't hold high faith there...

Most of the positive reviews have absolutely nothing to do with Phantom Liberty and are instead gushing about the 2.0 update which while great turns a meh game into a decent one 3 years after it should have already been that way.

Phantom Liberty itself is so far pretty decent, but far less content than I would have hoped given it being the only xpac coming and them having 3 years to work on it (longer, supposedly...).

Hopefully the story gets better because it's pretty meh so far, the new area is pretty great to look at, much less so to play in (it has some pretty annoying level design) but the missions are fanatic. My best wish for the game was if they had just dumped all the meaningless busywork gigs and just kept this level of quality, but alas.

Why the negative rating? Well, it doesn't really make Cyberpunk 2077 better, it just cuts the fat and shows you a glimpse of what cyberpunk 2077 could have been and what the sequel will hopefully be.

I can't recommend it to anyone on its own merits because as some of the reviewers pointed out, it's not really all that better than the base game and still doesn't make Cyberpunk a standout game, but it does give you more cyberpunk.

So if the original game didn't bore you, this will bore you even less, I guess.