Recent reviews by SandTrout

Mechanically, the game is a solid step up from its Persona predecessors.

Stylistically, I really don't like the character designs. With the exception of the one pseudo-furry race of the eugeif, which I found to be at least an interesting take on the concept, the characters are mostly boring in design, and half the outfits feel like they came out of the 1970's rather than some quasi-medieval or Renaissance era.

The character writing is mostly OK. Nothing profound, but nothing excessively grating for the most part. There's a fair bit of anime-style camp and melodrama, but that's part of this style of game IMO, so I can't consider that a mark against it.

The plot writing is the weakest part of the game. While fundamentally a coherent narrative, it's excessively bland. It feints at major plot twists, but never commits to them, what twists do actually occur don't really change anything, and therefore beg the question of why even bother with the "twist." The people's support for the main antagonist is not explored well at all, and you'll spend the game simply baffled at how anyone sees him as anything but an active threat to their safety.

Similarly, while inter-tribal discrimination is extremely prevalent throughout the story and setting, it's also not explored in any meaningful depth. The story has a running theme of "racism bad," which is fine on its own, but the specifics of the prejudices at play, the history of conflict between the tribes that created the prejudices, and an actual effort to have characters confront their own biases just aren't there. Through the story, you gain support from members of every tribe, but you never learn anything about the tribes or their history other than their superficial features, like horns, pointy ears, or vestigial wings. Generously, this is meant to drive a point that the differences are *only* superficial, but that point falls flat because there are allusions to a long history of conflicts between the tribes that that are presumably only suppressed from reigniting by the overwhelming power of the Royal Magic, which implies that you need a tyrannically powerful government in order to prevent strife, which I don't think is the message that was intended, nor an especially healthy one.

If it's on sale for $20 and you just enjoy persona-style games, it might be worth grabbing, but honestly, it's a weak entry by Atlus.

This game is riding on the coattails of P5 in a manner that seems particularly lazy to me.

The storyline is an uncompelling rehash of P5, the control and camera scheme is genuinely headache inducing because it keeps trying to recenter the camera while you're trying to use the mouse to control the camera, and the hack-and-slash gameplay just comes across as utterly braindead to me.

A solid entry for what it is, and the DLC all add substantial content to justify their existence.

This is NOT Armored Core. The mechs, even light mechs, are relatively slow and plodding, and managing incoming damage is an important skill.

A fun little arcady space-shooter. Not terribly impressive, but worth a few dollars.

This game is great to play with friends. The environments are beautiful, the gunplay feels good, and the setting is just laughably absurd.

Unfortunately...

The game is still struggling with various technical and design issues with persistent bugs and dubious balance on many items in the game.

In general, worth playing as long as Sony keeps their noses out of places it doesn't belong.

It's a fun game that has a lot of features that really ought to be included in most Turn Based strategy games, mainly the visible movement grid and Line of sight and range indicators to let you know what you can actually shoot from your new location so that you don't move somewhere and suddenly be informed that a rock blocks your shot to your target.

Well put together game that, unlike some somewhat similar games, actually runs well on PC.

The combat is fairly compelling, though sometimes the bosses can seem a bit tedious if you're not sure how to deal with them, in which case you should go ahead and look it up on the wiki if you're not into suffering through learning it on your own.

I'd recommend looking up how class progression works before starting the game, as it's about clear as mud how the stats grow and interact with abilities on your first playthrough.

This game would be good if the servers were worth a damn. Unfortunately, the servers are not worth a damn and suffer from low update rate and random lag spikes.

A fun tactical/stealth game with a tongue-in-cheek take on intersteller corporatism.

The only downsides are it's a bit short and honestly a bit shallow in its mechanics. It's still fun to play and the writing is entertaining enough comedy.