Recent reviews by Thechugg7

Really short game but it truly perfectly captures the modern streaming culture along with what happens behind the scenes of most of those streamers.

A story of life, death, and what it means to be human. Filled with humor as well as buckets of gore and great characters.
It's really good.

One of the greatest coop Action RPG.
You can even play through 99% of the story in coop, which I can't believe I have to say it's an extremely rare feature in those games.
Congrats Stranger of Paradise. You are the best Action Coop game!

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The best game Fromsoft ever made. Also the easiest!

What an interesting experiment this game is. I will separate this review in three parts to better explain it: reviewing the game as an RPG, reviewing it as a Yoko Taro directed game, and reviewing the experience as a whole.

The RPG part.

This game is a pure classic RPG, it has almost no card game element and the cards are only visuals.
The party setup is the usual JRPG 3 characters (with more in reserve). But the base 3 characters are so good I ended up never swapping them.
It is an extremely simple RPG recommended for beginners, with a level cap of 30 which you will reach by the end. The one superboss in the game also isn't that hard to beat. If you are looking for a challenge this will not be the game for you.
Here is a list of interesting mechanics that this game tries to work with:

-limited party wide heals. You don't get a ton of party wide heals, making attacks that hit your entire party extremely effective, and putting you in situations where you have to choose who gets the heal and who can stay at low health, making for some tense late game encounters.

-no healing out of combat except items. If you are not using items the only for you to heal is to find someone to fight, this is interesting because you will have moments where you want to delay the end of a fight or the phase of a boss in order to heal before proceeding.

-random events. some fights will have random events happen and they usually affect both the enemies and your own party. These are truly random so restarting a boss fight will put you in a different situation depending on the event card drawn.

-visible stats. The game shows you precisely the attack/defense/hp of everyone, enemy included. Due to some weird maths the numbers aren't 100% correct but you can still use them for quick calculations.

-tile jumping. You can move to any tile you have encountered with some very specific exceptions in like 5 rooms in the entire game. Meaning you can skip every encounter from Overworld to Dungeon by jumping to the exit tile, this weirdly invalidates an item in the game that allows you to escape dungeons.

-gem system. This RPG completely removes mana points and replaces everything with a gem system, at the end of a character's turn, you get a gem, some skills require multiple gems to activate. This gives you some simple strategies where you save gems for a big heal or a strong AOE.

-completely free inns. Not only are the inns free they also all have different reasons for being free in every town, be sure to check them out!

-elemental weaknesses. The most used trope in RPG games, they are here to stay. Sadly even though you have a monster compendium you can't see enemy weaknesses anywhere in the game, you have to remember yourself which element they are weak to, hard for players with a poor memory like me.

tl;dr Short RPG (12 hours to beat, even faster if you turn on fast animations), extremely simple mechanics but enough to keep you engaged.

The Yoko Taro part

How does this compare to Yoko Taro's other works?
Well in the first 30 minutes of the game, you encounter an old lady on the road and help her. Not even 2 minutes go by and you discover she was actually abused by her husband and she cut him up and ate him.
This might seem shocking to most players but honestly after what he wrote in his other stories this seems a bit too predictable at this point. I can't say the game really surprised me in big ways. It's missing a lot of 4th wall breaking moments (there is only one that happens in a conversation with an NPC).
I accidentally got the true ending on my first playthrough and damn this is the happiest ending Yoko Taro has ever shown us I have to say it's a wild departure from his other games.
There is no NG+ that dramatically changes the game, the only way to get the endings is to redo the final boss. NG+ should have been used to either add on top of the story or remix encounters.

tl;dr if you want more of small scale yoko taro (the one you get in the weapon stories), you'll get exactly this. But don't expect some mind bending 4th wall break.

The Experience

Overall it's a solid experience, the art on the card is absolutely stunning, and the pixel art DLC changes the cards of every NPC, every main character and every monster in the game including bosses (only things unchanged are the items and skills).
The mood is there, the narrator is great, the soundtrack isn't oppressive and lends itself to a small tabletop adventure like this one. You sadly don't get a lot of unique mechanics tied to the entire game being a board, with the exception of the final boss visual, looks really cool.

In conclusion, the experience of the game is really good, not perfect, not the level of NieR. But it's a cozy game with great visuals, great mood. It is very short however, 12 hours to finish (with normal animations), and got the full achievements at 17 hours (with fast animations on this time). So you might want to get it on a sale.

This game is basically the Skyrim of its generation it's good and for some it's a breath of fresh air and the first time they will ever experience a detailed and immersive world like this.
But remember that like Skyrim the game is pretty buggy, it has huge QoL issues and definitely needs some mods to fix its core problems.

0/10 one background has a vinland saga manga when it was not created in 2009!
Just kidding!
It's really good!
Has less content than Re-Up but a bit more than the original.
Still the same great characters!

Will update the review when I complete the game but here are my thoughts as a big mana fan so far.
This game really makes me happy, it makes me smile, it feels like a 90s SNES arpg brought to life in a 2024 arpg presentation. My biggest issue is the price point so far, the game is really Double A which I love but it is prices like a Triple A title which might make some people disappointed. It's a really cozy, really fun game that doesn't need itself to be a crazy action game or another soulslike. Another aspect is how kid friendly the game is, I grew up on the mana titles and they were kid friendly enough while still keeping some really tragic stories and this tradition seems to continuing to this day, in fact even though it's a big 3D game now the controls feel really good and I can definitely see myself giving this to my kids, this is the kind of games nostalgia is born from.

Now the bad news, the studio that made this game has been shut down the day of the games release. It's a really tragic tale, one of money. We probably don't know all the details yet, but so far it seems that china was investing a lot of money into japanese games, one of the result of this investment was Visions of Mana and its studio. Now that Black Myth Wukong is a major success, chinese companies have pulled fundings from japanese games and will invest more in domestic entertainment.
This might be the last mana game but I really think they went out with a bang, with a game that has more soul and passion than any Triple A you will find recently.

So yeah a recent patch completely messed up the entire underlying frame rate physics. This is absolutely pitiful and incompetent. The patch should be reverted this instant. No. It shouldn't even have been pushed out in the first place. Screw Gearbox...