Recent reviews by Nightmarian

Easily the best version of this game and the perfect one for newcomers, even if you're new to the series. This is a series I've always loved more than even Final Fantasy Tactics and IMO is vastly superior. I wish they would make a new one in the classical vein and not turn it into some stupid shallow action combat game or something, but alas this will do and do well it does.

It's not an easy game or a short one, and there are multiple story paths (though only 3 major ones and the neutral path is short), but the game makes it easy for you to go back and replay through segments, it's literally a click away and you get to keep your levels and stuff kind of like new game +, just with more options. There's also a Disgaea-ish endgame that will eat away too many hours of your life if you really care about min/maxing and grind.

Overall, no, this isn't going to be going viral the way more casual-friendly games are, but if you're a JRPG fan, and especially if you're a SRPG/TRPG fan, this is definitely one of the must-play games in the genre.

Fantastic story, actually respectful remaster/remake that has had thought go into modernizing the mechanics, tons of QoL features that honestly even new (J)RPGs need, and bonkers voice acting, the kind Square Enix used to be famous for a few years ago before they started cutting corners.

Well worth it if you like these kinds of games or want a blast to the past.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was short, but that's about the only negative I can really bring up about this game. Really dragged me along thanks to the mystery and boy what a trip. It has one of those "up to you to decide what it means" endings which I kind of hate, but here you can pretty easily put the pieces together and, well, it's sad and bittersweet, especially given the background context for Replikas (androids) the game feeds you over time.

The game uses some cool worldbuilding too. Humans are called Gestalts (something valued as being greater than the sum of its parts, very very clever) and live in a dystopian "Great Nation." That's what it's called, lol. They're involved in some kind of revolution but it's not important to the game, characters, or story honestly imo.

Overall, very fantastic horror game that's a masterful nod to the classics of old.

After the colossal failure that was Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, Star Ocean is finally back from the dead. And just like a zombie, it’s a rotten corpse that will never again find its place back among the living and was only lazily summoned to temporarily fulfill the whims of its necromancer master—Square Enix.

Ironically, this game isn’t bad per say, and it’s definitely nowhere near as bad as the previous game, but it IS depressingly mediocre. Like, there’s no reason to play this if you have other JRPGs on your backlog, as there’s nothing amazing here. The characters are all terribly bland, the art style has no idea what it’s doing, the open areas are an afterthought that are thoroughly tedious to explore, the crafting system is complete garbage and once again useless until and only if you care about the mindnumbingly boring post game, and combat is… frustratingly almost good.

I’m not going to get to deep into this, but basically the story is another trapped on primitive planet and get involved with local events story, something not all that unusual for Star Ocean, but that has somewhat annoyed fans for a while. It distances everyone, because the MC (one of them anyway) is only there by pure chance and has no real agency in the story. He’s not from the world, is really only broadly interested in being rescued from his stranding and going back into space, and simply helps because he happens to get attached to the locals. It’s not HIS fight, and he’ll eventually have to ‘leave’ it all behind, something that looms over our heads the entire game. This isn’t a story about a hero avenging his family or defending his people or finding the truth about his past or anything about himself at all, but him just walking into someone else’s story, shrugging, and going along with it out of boredom, which is exactly how we feel like.

And it’s not interesting. The politics are dull and without nuance, the ‘twists’ are laughable and can be seen a mile away, the character interactions make little sense, and the overall plot is long in the making but flounders during the payout. Like, the final stretch of the game so far is just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of cutscenes and that’s when we just FINALLY made it into space. This is probably the shortest Star Ocean in existence and not in a good way.

Unfortunately, it’s just so hard to care about, well, anything. The plot isn’t gripping, the character stakes are pretty low most of the time, the few interesting mysteries have terrible payouts, and basic RPG stuff like customization of the party, enemy variety, interesting boss encounters, etc, are so lackluster that it’s not even funny. You quickly find yourself just trudging through new areas mechanically, cleaving through enemies on even the highest difficulty, blinking boredly at the uninteresting plot points which are disjointed because Enix decided in their infinite wisdom to exclude certain story beats to one or the other protagonists, though this is definitely NOT a game you’d want to play more than once.

As for the combat, it’s actually pretty good and feels good… at least some of the time, because one key feature ruins it starkly. It uses a recharging AP system, and every single action costs AP, even ‘basic’ attacks. Weirdly, there isn’t a way to create a rhythm, so you are very often just stopping in the middle of combat and waiting for the AP bar to refill. There are SOME ways around this, but the problem is the very low starting AP amount, which is 5. There is no way so far to increase this permanently, and this is at best enough for a maybe 3 attack combo chain. Yeeeeeep. You have to stop combat and stand around (dodging halts AP recharge so you can’t even do that) every 3 attacks unless, you know, you use an attack that automatically burns most of your AP.

Now, for your party, 5 is the max cap period, which makes them somewhat useless as anything but one ability and done platforms. You, on the other hand, can eventually get up to I think 15 AP, but it resets whenever you restart the game back to 5 and in some other cases. To gain AP, you have to surprise enemies at the start of battle or do blindsides, which isn’t all that hard because enemy AI is terrible. Problem is that it’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tedious to do over and over again, especially when you’re freaking stuck at 5 AP during a boss battle, which is frustrating beyond belief, and I can’t for the life of me WHY they didn’t give you ways to permanently increase the AP count for every single person in your party in the skill tree.

This is reduced a bit by using DUMA, which is a mobility mechanic that is likely the only reason combat doesn’t make people punch their screen in, as it gives you a some one trick pony alternate attack that uses a different bar from AP to use. Overall, the combat feels good when it’s not restricting you, and annoying when it is, and you’ll bounce between both.

As for quality… well, it's nowhere near AAA, but calling it AA would be generous, I guess, yet calling it indie-like woudl be an offense to indie games, many of which easily slap AAA games across all four cheeks. The art direction is okay, characters and scenery set pieces don’t look bad, but mostly aren’t used well, i.e. very little emotion or facial expressions, lip sync on english voices is nonexistent, monster types are generic as all hell and don’t fit environments, and there's no real lore or 'life' moments like characters commenting on their admittingly interesting gear choices (minus the girls, who weirdly all have butt-windows in their gear to reveal the spandex thin enough to reveal every freckle and birth mark on their rumps).

Music is forgettable, voice acting is actually pretty good this time around.

Overall, I just can’t recommend the game to anyone unless you’re a diehard Star Ocean fan desperate to just suffer through it and draw that notch. Even for diehard fans like myself, this is very painful to see… shocked we even got another Star Ocean after the last one, and I’m pretty sure we won’t get another one now.

The red flag should have been it releasing along all the other junk games Square Enix released back to back (Diofield Chronicles, valkyrie elysium, harvestella), all of which were equally low budget rushed jobs that are being scored terribly. Hurts me heart to see Square Enix treat freaking STAR OCEAN like throwaway junk, but hey, this is the same idiot company that is STILL doubling down on NFTs despite the market crashing months ago and that publicly stated they have to desperately (oh woe is them!) expand and focus on the western games market because the Japanese market wasn’t good enough for survival as a company anymore AFTER SELLING ALL THEIR HIGH PROFILE AAA WESTERN STUDIOS AND IP FOR EFFECTIVELY PENNIES! Like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, what the heck?

Square Enix used to be THE JRPG brand, but now they’re the joke in the community. All their games recently have been absolutely terrible, and I expect Forspoken to be that too. The best they have now is Final Fantasy 14, which was a miracle turn-around to begin with, and FF16, which is being made by the producer that saved FF14 and responsible for much-beloved FF11. Aside from that… well, all their IPs are dead, so the best we can hope for is for them to GENTLY remaster the classics we already know to be good.

I doubt we’ll see another Star Ocean ever again unless SE sells off the IP, and god I hope they do, but even if there is, I doubt I’ll be playing many games from Square Enix any more…

I have a weird relationship with Owlcat... they make great core games, but have terrible, terrible DLC. They insist on being "faithful" to the tabletop version of Pathfinder even if that means entire prestige classes in the game, like Assassain, are useless because literally 99% of the enemy types you face are immune to their core mechanic (I'm not exaggerating here), something which should have been IMMEDIATELY obvious and is EASILY fixed in a lore-friendly way.

And yet, they have their own completely unique CR system (challenge rating, how you decide how hard encounters are) and don't bother to add a lot of core/basic things from the TT that players of the core classes are used to having, such as many from Magus.

Worse, while their writing is supreme, their role as the unseen game master is terrible. I imagine that if I was ever playing with one of the devs as my group's GM, it'd take less than an hour before we flipped the table, took turns slapping the GM, and then stomped out before deleting that person from our phones and never talking to them again. If these devs actually do play Pathfinder, then it's very likely they made this game exactly because no one wanted to play with them, lmao. They make a lot of really weird mechanic and gameplay choices, have zero concept of difficulty curves (even for people who DO understand Pathfinder, which is their favorite excuse), and really don't know that tedious is not the same as challenging, all of which is made worse by the hordes of bugs that cripple the game. In their previous game, some of those bugs were invisible until they hardlocked your 80+ hour game, forcing you to START OVER!!!

And who can forget the fact that they also love tossing in under-baked yet still major systems, then don't develop it further at all, thus leaving it feeling annoying and shallow? Most people absolutely hated the janky kingdom system in the first game, which, by the way, is literally the whole point of that module. Here, the crusade system is some jank, shallow tactical RPG thing that people also hate... in a game about leading the crusade, lmao.

It just makes you scratch your head.

But beneath all the jank, while ignoring all the terrible DLC, while pretending Owlcat actually cares about OG Pathfinder and that mods aren't the ones putting in the work their DLC should have done by filling in the very obvious and large blanks and fixing stuff, there is a really good story and game with a whole lot of roleplaying potential.

I almost, ALMOST wish this was a game like Disco Elysium or that someone else had worked on the gameplay elements, because we're talking oldschool Obsidian or Bioware levels of storytelling and choices. But the GAME itself? Faithful to Pathfinder it is not, whatever they want to believe, and a good Pathfinder interpretation it isn't either.

Many starving fanboys will tell you it's the BEST we've got, and this is true... because, you know, CRPGs are pretty rare these days as are DnD and Pathfinder games in general. "The best we got" doesn't mean good.

So, conflicted as I am, I can't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't have specific tastes. Owlcat has a rabid fanbase that consists of two utterly separate factions:

1) Mathematicians and excel sheet wizards that spend more time theorycrafting builds than actually playing the game, and literally only play to optimize them, so they will make all choices in game solely based on what is optimal.

2) Story-starved, hardcore roleplayers, who try not to let all the clunky gameplay jank water down the interesting storyline and roleplaying pathways offered to you. After all, this is a game where you can become a living insect swarm that devours everything or an angel. A demon or a freespirited renegeade. A heartless lich or simply the chosen hero, and they all involve consequences. Very entertaining ones in many cases.

Unless one of the above, you're far better off playing something else. Divinity Original 2 is overall a far better game even if its storytelling is worse, and I suspect Baldur's Gate 3 will just be a better game period.

Weird game to review... god we've waited so long for this, but Atlus is both a studio you love to death and hate to death at the literal same time. Being owned by Sega was the best thing that could have happened, because boy did they put on some thick powdered gloves and menancingly walk in Atlus' direction.

The result is we're now slowly get long overdue remasters and ports of Atlus games as well as day 1 releases of new games. HOPEFULLY THIS CONTINUES; most of their recent games were either promised as exclusives long ago (SMT V was annoucned when the Switch ways over 5 years ago and just recently released...), but Devil Summoners 2 wasn't, and it came out multiplatform.

We will see whenever Persona 6 releases, I guess.

As for Persona 5, it's overall the best game in the series and ooozing with lots of style. To be blunt, it takes the best aspects of the prior two games and refines them, but it also leans completely in on the JRPG crowd. If you're not a JRPG fan, this isn't a game you'll really enjoy, as it goes in hard on tropes and genre expectations, and, well, you play as a Japanese high school student (which is like 90% of all anime and manga it feels like sometimes...).

That said, it's rather dark game, surprisenly so sometimes, but unfortunately never really takes those issues seriously, which is my only real problem with the game. It can also be a bit tedious in some parts, especially Mementos, and the average playthrough shoots around 70-100 hours so it's not a short game.

I hear people asking a lot about Persona 3 and 4. As a whole, neither are as good as 5, but in my opinion 3's story is the best of the trio and the most emotional, and I hope the remaster does it justice. It has the weakest gameplay by far, though. They eventually fixed it, but you used to not even be able to control your party members—the AI did it for you and you could only give them indirect commands.

Persona 4 lay much of the groundwork for 5, and it's obvious, but I still think the character interaction in 4 is better than 5, especially seceondary characters. One dungeon in particular really hits you in the gut, and the lead up to it is chef's kiss.

So yes, basically, each game excels at something in particular while Persona 5 generally is really strong overall and is only just slightly edged out in certain aspects by the prior two games.

If you're curious about 1 and 2, they are completely different from the rest of the series. Persona 3 was a pretty hard reboot. 1 and 2 mostly focuses on adults and a much more grim story, and didn't do too well, which is why the series was rebooted for 3.

I still think they're great JRPGs, but if you're here for what most people know (Persona 3, 4, 5), you ain't finding it at all in the first two games.

To conclude, this is a must buy game for JRPG fans, even if simply to help Sega slap Atlus across the face and make sure they stop randomally putting games as random exclusives.

I'd like to see Persona 6 on PC day 1, as well as ports of Etyrian Odyssey and Digital Devil Saga.

This is a weird one for me to review. It's basically the most "meh" JRPG in recent memorie for me, one that might just edge out into a fun but likely forgettable romp if you're a fan of Atlus's style of JRPGs like I am. Also, this game basically has nothing to do with devil summoners (likely why they removed the subtitle) or even Soul Hackers 1 (a devil summoners game) despite the concept of devil summoners existing in-world, as this is mostly subverted from the very get-go and your devil summoners even react to how they're not really acting like normal devil summoners anymore... most of your human opponents do, but it's ultimately kind of pointless fluff the way enemies are presented, though.

That's okay, I guess. but I kind of wish it was a true devil summoner game... the other characters aren't all that interesting and imo it would have been better to have Ringo (the MC) be a classic devil summoner on her lonesome, summon demons directly, and just have her use soul hack to resurrect whatever character is to become the current story arc's central figure. Instead, you stick with a 4-man team forever and much of the game focuses on them while very lightly touching on stuff like what a human soul really is and what it means to be human.

Unfortunately, it regards to that, there's just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of wasted potential so far that has me really frustrated. This isn't new for JRPGs, which usually take a pretty shallow approach to concepts like good and evil. It's by intent; a lot of JRPGs share tropes with anime (specifically stuff like Naruto, Demon Slayer, Dragon Ball Z, etc), and shōnen, which is what that genre is called, is literally targeted at young boys. That's why a lot of JRPG MCs are young teenage boys, and why the stories never touch on darker or more mature themes like many western RPGs commonly do.

But Soul Hackers 2 has an entire cast of adults exploring what it means to be human as well as the nature of death and the human soul... Not a child in sight (technically), and yet the game immediately and forever shies away from any meaningful engagement with those concepts. There's even an early joke about getting addicted to soul hacking (the supposedly emotional process that brings the dead back to life), so it's all shallow and lighthearted. Anyway, the game's leads are the same guys who did Tokyo Mirage and you can really tell... so yeah. At least the story premise here isn't laughably ridiculous from the start as it was in their last game.

While not outright terrible (writing is fine, voice acting is good), it all adds up to a kind of meh storyline and you never really end up caring about any of the characters. The game also looks pretty simplistic and doesn't have very extensive scenery or dungeons, though the individual character models are well-done. I've never once been awed upon entering a new area or dungeon.

Combat remains Atlus's best strength. It's probably what you'll enjoy the most, and there is a crapton of it. Unfortunately, there's a really repetitive, drab Mementos-like area (for those who come from Persona 5) that doesn't really add many twists (looks the same, pretty linear, all the quests involve just killing enemies or boss versions of normal enemies, etc), and boy does it get old and tedious after 5 seconds.


Overall, it's a decent JRPG that I think true fans of JRPGs will view as a game with more positives than negatives, as most of those negatives are also things JRPG gamers have long dealt with. It's not an outright terrible game, and can serve to fill in time gaps in between what I would consider far better JRPGs (Persona 5, The first Crossbell Arc Trails game, etc), and if you play western RPGs too, there's probably a lot better upcoming options out there too depending on tastes.

I'm going to give it a thumbs up, but I'm going to finish by saying this will never be a must-play and will probably be forgotten by the end of the year, and it's definitely never going to be considered one of Atlus's best games.

Really, really fun game with a great core loop. The 'cult building' simulation part is a nice palate cleanser from the rouguelite and does it better than pretty much any other roguelite's system. The music is also banging.

If you're pretty good at games like this, I'd recommend trying the highest difficulty, because otherwise the game ends up being extremely easy.

I don't think this is something you will be able to sink a billion hours into as neither the sim or roguelite seems designed for a fully circular loop like many others such as Hades, but it's supposed to be 22-30 hours and for the price and quality, you can't complain about the ride!

It's a good game. Probably not nearly as good as Mechanicus, but definitely prettier and close enough to enjoy. It's weighed down a lot by the usual lack of Warhammer 40k game creativity; here we have yet more space marines who know exactly what they have to do only to be intercepted by an angry inquisitor who plays antagonist more strongly than the Ruinious Powers themselves, and it's as old and repetitive as always even with us getting to play the rather unique (for space marines) Grey Knights.

It's also bolstered by fantastic voice work and pretty great characterization. Ectar was super annoying 99% of the way through, but the Dominus was a fantastic character and credit to the fact that we need less space marine games and more games with the other factions, even imperium ones like custodians, mechanicus, navy, imperial guard, inquisition, whatever. I was probably more interested in her history than anything else in the game save Vakir, who, as with most inquisitors, did a good job being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that keeps itself pointing and pooping at the enemy -- most of the time.

The game lacks in some places though. The music and sound is far worse than Mechanicus. I also wish there was a tad bit more enemy variety. It also suffers from the same problem as Mechanicus of being really hard at the start and then getting mind numbingly easy towards the end up until the final mission, which unless you have two A-teams, is going to f you hard. If you're reading this, make sure to have 8 prime time knights, not 4 lmao even though 4 can easily carry you through the game. I suspect a lot of people will just stop playing the last mission... it demands a lot from you and not at all in a fun way.

The other problem was the RNG. It was a bit annoying that some important abilities were lazy coin flips, as well as non-influenceable randomness for mission rewards and locations. At least 'legally;' if you want to, you can save before they appear and save scum the crap out of them, and you might need to. Sometimes the game will randomly decide it's okay to add 3 corruption to 3 worlds on the other side of the galaxy, then on a reload it's 2 worlds with no corruption getting their first, lmao. The randomness of rewards also makes it hard to gear your knights the way you want, since you're already praying for what you need of the right tier, and then have to slog through a mission hoping it's not a garbage item, because you can't save scum final rewards, they remain consistent once you enter the mission it seems.

Overall, a very great Warhammer 40k game, which is saying something. My only real qualms are that it can be tedious and frustrating at time, especially thanks to the heavy RNG and lack of pre-planning options, and but the game also loses all semblance of difficulty in the endgame.

If you liked Mechanicus, you'll probably like this too. I still think Mechanicus is the more interesting game overall, but the story is portrayed far better here in Chaosgate and the mechanics are pretty fun. It's not really a story you'll remember though, and isn't as variable and fluffy as the options you have in say Xcom 2.

For technical issues, there's quite a few bugs, but none of them game-breaking from what I saw beating it. Just annoying, forcing a reload. I hear performance is pretty terrible on the low-end of specs too, so watch out.

At this point, it's probably 2022's Game of the Year, but even if it is't it's still one of the best games this year.

The core is great, but that's only because it carries forward the core of the previous games. What it adds are a huge step back. We're reset back to basic factions with incomplete rosters (understandable), so the narrative elements and mechanics seemed like a great way to liven them up. They are, for some of the races, while the rest are really stupid, like Kislev's lazy faction system--you know, the race that's the poster child of the game.

Then, thanks to the way the chaos rifts and new corruption mechanics work, the campaigns become this slog of sitting around ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skipping turns to tediously deal with problems, or parking your leader in cities so they can remove heavily damaging traits from the chaos realm they're forced to ender.

I never really liked 2's Vortex campaign much but at least you could mostly ignore it and play typical Total War, and some of the races did eventually have interesting campaign mechanics via the lord/race packs. Total War 3's campaign is way too tedious to be fun.

That's without going into the many technical issues and glitches, and a heap of UI changes that make zero sense. On top of that, they've put in some overzealous censorship for some reason when it comes to text input, so a ton of simple innocent stuff ends up with asterisks.

Game's not really worth it right now, definitely not at full price. Wait until it's on a steep sale or in a Humble Bundle. By then, it should have fixes and content, and what hasn't been fixed the community will fix as usual via mods. Sad to see that CA's final finishing touches on a great Warhammer offering was mishandled so badly. Guess this is what happens when you become complacent.

Welcome to the new age of AAA games losing to indies, I guess.