Recent reviews by MidnightSnacks

Feels like a logical conclusion of these characters, written just as well as the previous games. Cheer for some character in one route and wish death on them in another one. Assume the worst of a character and watch as they exceed it by doing the thing you thought but funnier. The only negative thing I could say about it is that it's shorter than the others, but even then I think 2 of the 5 endings are among the best in the series and none of them are bad.

The best faction in this game is dollar store EDF. The rest are ragdoll simulator. Just go play EDF.

"But it's a live service game!" Yeah and that live service boils down to the devs picking a faction and a map where matchmaking will work correctly this week and if enough people play it you get some currency for your cash shop stratagems. That and there was briefly a space station which bombarded the entire planet at random but that was too fun for the No Items Fox Only Final Destination playerbase so they got rid of it.

Did I mention this game has a cash shop despite costing $40? Seriously just go play EDF.

she's literally me

I can fix her

I don't think that the open world adds anything other than extra length to the game that is padded out with halfass filler content. There's a bunch of lame skyrim dungeons all over with uninteresting bosses, and most bosses are reused extensively.

There's almost 200 boss encounters in the game and by far the majority of them are repeat fights and multi-enemy fights. Some bosses are reused 4 or 5 times. A lot of the bosses are very bad, and they seem tuned to output ♥♥♥♥-you damage as like a "ehe you will lose all your souls" meme because everyone's used to this combat but it's got a reputation for difficulty to maintain. It just seems very low-effort.

The meat of the game is the "legacy" dungeons, which are basically your typical "Dark Souls" zone. Some are fantastic, some aren't. There aren't very many.

FromSoft is back on this race to the bottom of weapon variety where they nerf everything (PvE included) that the PvP community decides is OP until there's only a handful of things worth using. If you played DS2 or DS3 at launch you will be familiar with where that's headed.

I really got tired of hearing the same "generic boss encounter" music. I miss when bosses had their own music. A few do, the majority don't.

The story here is the least interesting of any game in this series unless you include Sekiro. Several NPCs go on extended loredumps or thoroughly explain their motivations, feelings, and plans at length and for no reason. You can cast a spell at a statue to be told the big twist in the lore.

The system where you can switch weapon arts is cool. A dedicated "jump" button adds a lot to the combat. It's nice that they made something other than R1s viable. It's a shame that all of these improvements to the combat are in service of fighting a reskinned Asylum Demon 9 times.

I had initially gotten into this game hoping it would be like Diablo or Torchlight but with an additional element of sailing around in a pirate ship in an open world ocean finding weird islands. It's not that.

A large amount of progress is gated behind getting an island's Token. Some of these are random drops from an activity on that island. Some of them come from running the same daily quest on that island for like a week. Almost all of them involve the island overstaying its welcome.

The endgame content in general actually just involves grinding things way past the point where they are any fun, seemingly just to facilitate people using the game's cash shop to skip it.

All of the interesting islands are on a rotating, time-limited schedule. So at any time, very few "islands" marked on your map will actually be active and accessible. Your options for things without large prerequisites are either boring or badly designed, like "fish up keys for chests, maybe the token is in one", "for 10 minutes every 2 hours, a NPC will sell a chest which maybe has the token in it", and "tiny PvP island and the token is a random drop from a chest in the middle".

There's almost nothing on the open sea apart from going from point A to point B. It is essentially a lobby that exists only to slow down how quickly you can move between content and make you want to buy ship microtransactions and access to more placeable teleport points.

I had hoped that the isometric viewpoint wouldn't be a huge issue, but the game seems determined to make it one. It's extremely fidgety when it comes to movement, but movement is necessarily imprecise due to the fact that it's relative to a fixed skewed viewpoint. It's extremely annoying to get hung up on tiny bumps in the "walkable" area or have your dodge completely wasted because you tilted 1 degree off parallel to the wall.

A large amount of progress is gated behind a collectible of which there are over a thousand in the game and the primary gimmick for most of them is that they're hidden behind something because of the isometric viewpoint.

There are many unclear or inaccurate translations. Text is frequently clipped because it is forced to fit inside a UI element that was big enough in Korean but it wasn't scaled to the length of the translated text.

The game has been out for a while in Korea and it is basically impossible to discuss endgame without someone chiming in with "actually right now in Korea what they're doing is-" like the current state of the game exists only to get to the state of the game that is currently live in Korea, and when the game catches up to that it will only serve as a prologue to the state of the game in Korea at that point. No class will ever be a surprise, and you will know every endgame boss before it contextually makes any sense. I don't think they plan to start doing synchronous updates, so this will be a problem for conceivably forever.

This is not a serious game that will withstand the MMO honeymoon period. It is interminably grindy and "whale-friendly".

Crashes an unbelievable amount for a AAA game
Cosmetics are unreasonably expensive or locked behind a variety of IRL promotions which are poorly advertised and time-limited
The cosmetics you can get extremely limited in how you can use them. Like you can unlock a paint color or a helmet but it can only be used with certain armor sets for no apparent reason
The latest event is a daily log-in like something out of a mobile gacha
The single-player campaign is okay

Story missions have optional objectives which have unique rewards like the ability to take certain characters on missions. However, you can't repeat story missions until you finish the game. I don't know who thought that was a good decision. It's just pointless and irritating.

Good game.
The crime-solving aspect is I guess technically open-ended in that the game will allow you to screw it up and see the end credits and technically never confirms who is or is not a culprit, but if you chase down every lead and pick up every collectible you will arrive at a pretty clear understanding of the case in a fairly straightforward manner.
The environment is I think helped more by the worldbuilding than the "open world" format. It's kinda vaporwave Bloodborne and maybe strays occasionally into "lore for lore's sake" but serves to keep things unsettling.
As for the map, it's a cool tropical island that's fun to explore but I'd say it's more like a very large puzzle room than an "open world". There's nothing dynamic, and the only thing to unlock is fast travel waypoints. In terms of scale it just starts to rub up against that annoying sensation that everything is slightly too small to be believable. It's not Death Stranding's "walk across the US in an hour" levels of cramped, but they tell you there's 3,000 civilians living in like a handful of apartment buildings and only like a third of the Syndicate have an identifiable "home". I do appreciate the attention to detail of putting farms, a power plant with poles and lines running around the island, a convenience store, etc.

Written and directed by the guy who made 999, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma. Like those, it's a sort of branching-narrative visual novel with puzzles at the branch points, and you have to follow all the branch paths to reach the real ending. The short version is: it's a big step up from those games in terms of presentation, but despite being longer feels like it ended a chapter too soon.

The timeline is extremely simple, with a handful of branch points and fewer story locks. The puzzles are bigger set pieces and the narrative interludes are longer and better animated. Still, the sheer straightforwardness was part of the reason I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop right up until the game confirmed it wouldn't be.

Another factor in that is the game kind of waffling on its maybe-mundane subversion of the director's trademark timeline shenanigans. "Ha! The timelines are actually totally separate and there's a logical explanation involving returning memories like a kind of reverse-dementia caused by the major plot point of the latter half of the game!", the game seems to imply to the player. And then sandbags by having Date say something that makes that explanation untenable.

The director's other games had 3 acts: "what's going on?", "what the ♥♥♥♥ is going on?", and "what the actual ♥♥♥♥ is going on?". This game just has the first two. They're more polished, and if they could have pulled off a third act with that level of production value this game would have been amazing. It's still really good though. I probably cared more about half of this cast than basically any Zero Escape character short of Luna/Diana.

Other minor notes:
+ The localization and dub was pretty good. Several actually hilarious lines. A handful of "I don't know what that joke was supposed to be but I can tell it didn't translate" moments. One or two sneaking suspicions that the original script had less of an agenda. One or two "according to keikaku"s that I can't really hold against them because yeah the only people playing Spike Chunsoft games are weebs
- Absolutely zero "I figured this out before you meant me to" easter eggs
- Dreamworks dance party credits