If I want to sit down and spend some time on a puzzle game that I know will hold my attention, I'll play nonograms. But where Picross is like the local pizza place that really cares about giving you the best slice around, Pic-a-Pix Pieces is more like the college food court that you only eat at when you're in between classes and short on time. It's still good, and I still recommend it, but there are other people out there putting a lot more time and effort into making this exact product.
I enjoyed slashing away at Aragami enough to have a good bit of fun with the combat, but I could never escape the feeling that I could be having so much more fun by playing a better game in the same genre.
Even the game's style and technical performance are wildly inconsistent between the sublime combat and sterile overworld. It feels half-baked in the most literal sense, with one half being cooked to perfection, and the other half still cold from the freezer. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm the one doing something wrong, because I'm just not sure how a game can be so incredibly good, and yet so very bad.
Aesthetically, the skies above Granaria are sublime. The graphics are beautiful, the music is superb, and the incredibly deep ecology of the flyfish that realistically react to overfishing patterns is so extensively detailed that I have no choice but to be impressed. However, repeating the same sections over and over to grind out money while trying to make progress with a crafting system that is so poorly explained made me dread every minute I spent with the game. There's a solid foundation for gameplay once you're in the skies chasing fish and fighting pirates, but every minute that you're not dogfighting your way through the clouds to chase exotic creatures is so frustrating and dull that I just can't bring myself to spend any more time searching for Amelia's elusive Skywhale.
Even the Switch port isn't quite as good as RE4's, running at an inconsistent framerate that never manages to hit 60fps—sometimes not even hitting 30fps. I had a good time playing through a chunk of the game online with a friend, but playing on my own was just dull. It's probably true that RE5 was never going to live up to RE4's legacy, but now, a decade after its original release, I think it even fails to live up to its own.
S. and Kodai's research, but Takuya's casually gross candor never stopped pulling me out of the story and reminding me of how creepy visual novels could be sometimes. YU-NO is a monumentally impressive piece of the genre's history that finds ways to impress even today, but perhaps it's best not to load a jewel placed back in the 90s and travel back to a time when "sex sells" was the core tenant of the visual novel framework.
The problem was that the process of actually seeing what came next was a dreadful slog that just frustrated me more and more as the game went on. It feels like a game made for the most dedicated of Platinum Games fans, and I'm certain that anyone who loves racking up combos as quickly as possible for platinum medals will love this game. Diehard fans of character action games will have a lot to love here, but everyone else will have to put up with a lot of trouble to get to the good parts.
It felt like I was spending more time waiting for the game to load or process than I was actually playing, and eventually I just ended up with a strong urge to redownload it on Steam and play it there instead. Since XCOM 2 is entirely turn-based, the poor performance doesn't really have an effect on the gameplay, so if you can put up with it then the game is still just as good as it ever was. I couldn't really put up with it, though, so sadly this is one Switch port that really drags down an otherwise excellent game.
It's unfortunate, since the voice acting, visuals, and overall cinematic direction of both cutscenes and gameplay are all excellent. This game is the product of a passionate and talented team. It's just a shame that their efforts were all in service to writing that is cynical, regressive, outdated, and just plain exhausting.
I love the setting based in Greek mythology, and I've been enjoying the adventure almost non-stop, only ever getting bored during the icon hunt whenever I reach a new area once every couple of hours. It's a shame that Switch players will be getting such a compromised version, since I really feel like the weak port does a huge disservice to everything the game succeeds at. I think you should play Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but you should not do so on Switch if you can help it.
The only thing that I think this collection truly accomplishes is making some great games available on modern consoles, and that is the absolute bare minimum I can ask. These games-with the possible exception of Sonic 1-are great, and this is a perfectly playable version of them. Sadly, we've seen the potential of what a Classic Sonic collection could be, and Sonic Origins absolutely does not live up to that potential.
Alan Watts' philosophy lectures are intriguing, but it's not very interesting getting from one lecture to the next. I was never able to be engaged or immersed in the world. Despite being a game about how all things are related, I found the silly, empty experience of Everything very unrelatable.
With the only changes being an excellently redone soundtrack, this port is the perfect way to relive your memories of the Playstation 2 classic. However, if you've never played Onimusha, this port's only real value is as a simple way to experience a piece of history. Over the course of 18 years, other games have improved on everything that once made Onimusha great.
RemiLore just doesn't have enough variety to stay interesting for more than a few minutes. Though the characters are mildly entertaining with an impressive amount of dialogue to flesh out their interactions, there's just too much you need to put up with to get to the good parts of the game. Rogue-lite and Action RPG are two crowded genres, and RemiLore unfortunately decided to tackle them both without covering even the basics of what makes either interesting in the first place.
Ashen is not awful, and I think that any hardcore Souls fans who just can't get enough of this style of combat will enjoy it. The open world adds a new layer to the Soulsborne format that succeeds more than it fails, but it comes at the cost of weakening a core pillar of the genre. The result is a passable experience, and in a genre that's quickly becoming as crowded as this one, passable just won't cut it for anyone but the most hardcore of fans.
Princess Maker is a tough series to get into. The horrible translation is enough of a barrier to entry on its own, but the total lack of tutorials to explain the complexity of the different stats only serves to make the game very difficult for newcomers. If you manage to get over that steep learning curve, there’s a surprisingly deep simulation game waiting on the other side, but it is a tough sell with a mediocre localization of one of the more middling entries to the series.
I think the game would've been better if it really was just about driving around Paris getting to know these people who are living out their everyday lives. The mystery-solving is half baked, and the fact that you can't carry the stories of your passengers forward into future cases just makes me wish the mystery wasn't there at all. I really did love the conversations I had with the game's diverse cast, but in the end I was just left frustrated that I wouldn't be able to see them through to their end without slogging through a lot of stuff I'd already seen.
So much of its obtuse systems and mechanics are poorly explained (or outright not explained at all) that you'll need to really want to understand everything to be able to power through and figure it out. Afterimage will undoubtedly have its fans since the game has figured out the hard parts-gorgeous art, snappy combat, and a sprawling, detailed world. Sadly the game stumbles on the boring parts-tutorials, equipment screens, and general UX design-which creates a frustrating experience for anyone that doesn't quite 'get' it on the first try.
Pikmin 2 is a tough game to recommend, especially with the brand new Pikmin 4 featuring a much more successful version of its key feature, the caverns. The high difficulty requires a lot of investment from the player to overcome, and the lack of bespoke design underground makes the journey to overcome those obstacles too tedious to feel rewarding. Dedicated fans who want to be pushed into learning the intricacies of Pikmin's mechanics will find something special in the unique challenge, but pretty much everything else about Pikmin 2 has been pulled off much better in another game in the franchise.
I give Ubisoft Montpellier a lot of credit for taking a level-headed look at a period of history that usually gets overshadowed, but the gameplay didn't get nearly as much attention as the aesthetics. If the puzzles had been more unique or interesting they could've propped up the story instead of dragging it down to mediocrity. Instead Valiant Heart turns one of the greatest conflicts in human history into a dull, repetitive chore.