Mollie L Patterson's Reviews
I Am Setsuna is a mixture of beautiful, heartfelt, and depressing moments, one whose depth is unfortunately overshadowed by its over-abundant moments of shallowness. The worth in Setsuna may end up being not in what it did on its own, but the groundwork it provides for future projects.
Though its visuals still betray the legacy of SNK’s rich and gorgeous 2D sprite work, The King of Fighters XIV revives the glory of the franchise where it counts most: gameplay and core mechanics. This will hopefully be the first step in a better future for the series, but even this unpolished first entry is worth the time for longtime fans and newcomers alike.
The long-running Project Diva formula gets a welcome freshening up in Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X. While a good-but-not-great soundtrack and a few misguided decisions keep it from reaching its full potential, this is probably the best chapter gameplay-wise we’ve received in the West yet.
While Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse could easily have been a lazy reuse of content from its predecessor slapped together to make a quick buck, a different perspective on the story, a host of improvements, and the return of Shin Megami Tensei IV’s quality gameplay come together for a pseudo-sequel that’s a worthy experience.
Sadly, Dragon Quest Builders isn’t quite the Dragon Quest meets Minecraft mash-up that I was really hoping for. What it does, however, is offer an engrossing adventure that proves giving a world-building engine some storyline, characters, and proper combat goes a long way.
A weird, niche, visually out-of-date little game from a Japanese team you’ve probably never heard of became one of the best horror games to be released in America in years back in 2013. Now, it’s being given new life on the 3DS, and the changes it’s received make for a better experience—mostly.
I don’t know exactly how the idea to create World of Final Fantasy came about in the halls of Square Enix, but it’s a game that could have been so much better had it been given different focus. As it is, it’s a relatively enjoyable RPG that offers up some legitimately enjoyable moments while simultaneously causing you to sit in bewilderment at what you’re experiencing.
Final Fantasy XV is nowhere close to the game that we should have received after 10 years of waiting—but it also isn't anywhere close to the trainwreck that it easily could have been. While the storytelling is a mess and the game feels incomplete far too often, there's enough to love here—from combat, to exploration, to the four Japanese pretty boys that make up your main party—to make FFXV a road trip worth going on.
Western Vocaloid fans—and the Project DIVA franchise itself—have now received the very best that Sega’s music gaming efforts have produced up until this point. Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Future Tone is a stellar rhythm game, offering fantastic gameplay supported by a massive list of music.
While the original Gravity Rush pushed the Vita to its limited, Gravity Rush 2 is unleashed upon the far more powerful PlayStation 4, giving us a game that’s as big in scope and substance as the concept designs its world and characters were born from. Among Sony’s efforts to give their console a wide array of more niche experiences, this gravity-controlling Kat is Queen.
You'll go into Team Ninja's latest project thinking it's Dark Souls with samurais and ninjas, but come out knowing it to be its own unique experience. Nioh is an enthralling adventure, filled with great combat, characters, monsters, and locations, and only really stumbles when it tries to be a little too much like other games out there.
While Nier: Automata at times feels unpolished or under-developed, when taken as an entire experience, it's a fantastic journey of a group of androids struggling to live up to their purpose in life. Here, unconventional narrative design meets tightly-developed combat gameplay, and that turns out to be one heck of a combination.
It's hard not to wish that Persona 5 had taken more influence from Catherine than it did, but as the culmination of the past ten years of the Persona series, it still stands as one of the best Japanese RPGs to exist—and a visual masterpiece whose style has no equal.
1989's Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap could have felt way out of its league here in 2017, but the impressive job that LizardCube has done updating it for our modern era has really given it a second life. It's a great retro-meets-future gaming experience marred occasionally by elements that just don't work as well all these years later.
Puyo Puyo Tetris seemed like an unexpected crossover when it first hit Japan in 2014, and it still does now that it's come to the West. And yet, the idea has come together wonderfully, providing a release that has a lot to offer for fans of either game or simply the puzzle genre in general.
I walked away from Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers surprised at how much fun I could still find in the game, even when playing on the less-than-adequate controls the Switch offers by default. Still, that enjoyment doesn't change the fact that Capcom was off the mark on this release—we either should have received the game as a cheaper digital download, or as a more expansive collection.
Nex Machina is another fantastic arcade-inspired retro homage from the folks at Housemarque. I think it may be the most stressful of the trio of such releases from the studio so far, but that'll give more hardcore players an added push to get good and improve their scores. Lesser-skilled players, however, may feel even more lost among the madness.
Final Fantasy XII released to mixed opinions when it first hit back in 2006, and even today, fans will still argue over where it deserves to land on a listing of the best chapters of the franchise. It received those opinions because it was a bold, daring, and different chapter of a series that up-ended our expectations for what Final Fantasy should be—and all these years later, those elements are part of the reason why I still think it's one of the best entries we've ever received.
While Splatoon 2 wasn't the go-all-out sequel I would have loved to have seen following the original Wii U game, simply getting it onto the Switch and giving it a selection of new content still makes a trip back to Inkopolis more than worthwhile. Previous fans should find enough new here to reignite their interest in the series, while new players will have a whole lot of fantastic gaming to sink their cephalopod teeth into.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is the action adventure genre stripped of its excess, until a smaller, more personal journey remains. While it may feel shallow and lacking for some, those wanting something other than the usual big-budget 70-hour fare will find Senua's story to be unlike anything else in recent years.