Recent reviews by Mast.Ros

My god, I cannot get enough of the combat system. The Shinra VR Challenges and Superbosses are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. Sure you are pigeonholed into a particular playstyle but man is it rewarding. I went ahead and got all cheevos for the game. I have revised my earlier score of 7 to an 8. The Weiss boss fight is top-tier action/strategy combination. This game would be PEAK if it werent bogged down with slow movement sections, frequent useless cutscenes and Leviathan in particular because he's a piece of ♥♥♥♥ boss that wastes your time flying around while being resistant or straight up immune to damage.

The INTERmission DLC honestly fixed a lot of my issues with the slowdowns as Yuffie is a fast character in terms of general movement. The synergy system with Sonon is bloody ingenious. This brings a whole new aspect to the combat and I hope this is already a thing in Rebirth. This system paired with playable characters is 100% going to be fun. Its only held back in the DLC because Sonon is a non-controllable character. He legitimately becomes your tank in certain fights because the AI in the game is bad.

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I'm not going to write a lengthy review with this one. I have no nostalgia for the original since I had never played it until after I had started playing this game.

Let's start with the graphics. The game looks gorgeous but at the same time we have some really low fidelity assets, especially things far off in the distance. Chapter 15 is the place where it's visible the most. The minor fidelity issue aside, the art direction of the game is splendid. Nothing more to say here.
Look, after hearing for years how peak FFVII is, I was quite disappointed with the OG story to begin with. Sephiroth is straight up a mustache twirling villain although I concede that the buildup to him was what made it cool. This remake though expands the first 6-8 hours of the original and makes it a 40 hour game. Now there are absolutely things that got an improvement from this. We got more character interactions, we get to actually see what life is like in the undercity etc. The problem here is the amount. There is a great deal of padding in the game. Too many crawlspaces and too many segments where you are forced to walk. The sidequests range from great to absolute chores.

The gameplay is great though, that is when you get to be in combat after all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cutscenes and talking and finding people etc. I expected to not like the ATB system much, but it grew on me. I think bosses for the most part are well designed save a couple that are absolutely horrendous to fight against, not because they're difficult but because the boss fight itself is tedious if you've not entered the fight with the correct materia. Overall I think the combat is the strongest point of this game. There are also decent weapon options for all characters depending on the type of build you want to try.


The story was alright I guess but a lot has been sanitized from the OG. Sector 7 people dying was a thing that really gave a bleak feeling in the original but somehow in this game we've managed to completely kill that by evacuating everyone. Similarly, Jenova reveal in the Shinra Tower was a great quasi horror sequence in the original but now it's somehow caught the Danganronpa disease of having purple blood all over the level instead. I don't actually care for all the rewriting fate/multiverse plot point though. Sephiroth shows up way too often for my liking. This removes any sort of tension as opposed to what I think they intended. There is too much exposition in the game. The original keeps you on your toes because it refuses to give you answers until you've progressed to beyond Kalm City iirc. Here everyone wants to have their monologue and explain their plans.

Getting to the last act of the game. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the amount of boss fights back to back. I got sick of it. Why did we need a Sephiroth boss fight at all? To remind people that he's still the big bad? The arbiter of fate boss? Driving boss? They really just wanted to extend playtime after a certain section and it is abundantly clear. Half these bosses were longer than they should have been even on Normal.

I also played Chapter 6, 8, 16, 17 and 18 on hard and my god was it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring. Now before people come at me with 'Git Gud' comments, I already beat the bosses. The point is that it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying. I can understand not allowing healing in battle via items but what is the point of not having it reset MP on benches or at least allow MP item usage outside of combat? They could've had benches restore MP too but could've made it so that people cant abuse it by allowing only one usage per bench. Anything would be better than what exists. You have to scrounge the level for boxes and hope you get a mako shard to get some MP back. Good luck with that on the final mission though.

On going through the whole Hard playthrough I can see that the MP issue that I faced initially was only due to poor build choices so I retract my statement. The combat still feels great but its getting quite stale because once you settle into a loop with your build; since the fundamental way you approach boss fights remains the same i.e. hit weakness -> Build pressure. I wish there were unique mechanics with bosses like the airbuster in the beginning in choosing how you want to nerf him and so on. I hope this is improved on in Rebirth.

All in all, this game has been a middling experience. I hope Rebirth is better especially considering that Act II is one of the stronger parts of the original. Could have been much better.

After playing through the game for another 10 hours, I retract some of my earlier statements. There is still a degree of button mashing involved, but it's not as much as before. New enemies are not exactly done well imo. Some of them are great, some of them are really ♥♥♥♥. Regardless, playing at half your level still does not take any great amount of skill, but it's more enjoyable than in the beginning.That said, the whole chain mechanic just drags the combat on for far too long. I am not kidding when I say that a 8-reduction battle (on hard diff) in the game is about as long as the final boss of Persona 5.

It's clear that some of the milestones set during the story mission are quite impossible to complete when you encounter them. I suppose the idea is to return to these missions later with more powerful gear to curbstomp the enemies and get the points. I'm really not fond of this system.

The story has improved though, but not without the monkey's paw curling. Returning cast from TWEWY are fun and honestly it's improving the character dynamics. It's most likely just nostalgia speaking, but it's making the game more digestible. Getting to the monkey's paw that curled, the abortion that is the time travel ability should never be implemented in any game ever. It is mind-numbingly boring to traverse the same 6-7 areas cyclically a TOTAL OF 4 TIMES IN A SINGLE MISSION. WHAT THE ACTUAL ♥♥♥♥? They do this during normal missions as well. It becomes incredibly frustrating to play when there is so much repetition.

With this update, I am going to revise the score from a 5/10 to 6.5/10. I do not see myself increasing the score beyond that due to the sheer amount of filler content and as of Week 2 - Day 4 I have given up on the game. This has become a chore rather than a game.

I do think the game is kinda worth playing but I suppose the only people that will see this through the end are the ones that dont mind tolerating the negative aspects of the game and strictly go for a Visual Novel experience.
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Man, I remember playing the original TWEWY and being absolutely enthralled by the story and the unique combat system on the DS. I was pumped for this release and grabbed the game on day 1, only to be met with a genuinely terrible game. I dropped it almost immediately. Now, about 3 years later, I've came back to give it another shot, and my god, it’s still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring.

The story feels bland, and the characters are completely forgettable. I don’t care about the protagonist or his annoying friend. I get that the original TWEWY came out in a different time when these themes weren’t as common, but now? The story just has no meat.

The combat is awful. The new pin-leveling system sucks because once you hit the cap for a pin, you’re basically forced to switch to something with higher base damage. That means you end up using pins you don’t even enjoy, while the ones you do like get left behind thanks to nonexistent scaling. The combat itself is a joke, its carpal tunnel simulator speedrun. I was trying to play it methodically in the beginning and getting STAR ranks on all battles until I realized that I could do 5 chain battles while being 3 levels downgraded, on HARD difficulty while button mashing and still never end up with anything less than an A rank. This even works on bosses so I have no clue what they were going for. The beatdown timer exists for no other reason other than to be annoying in the middle of the combat. Give me time to finish my damn combo before you start a timer that depletes in 3 seconds. For reference, some charge pins take longer than that to go off. .

Outside of combat, the handholding is ridiculous. I don’t need constant hints for puzzles a baby could solve blindfolded. And don’t get me started on the time-travel mechanic, you end up replaying the same level over and over for a tiny change. I’ve only made it to Day 7 and I’m already ready to throw in the towel. I seriously can’t do any more of this.

And the fixed camera? WHY? Why can’t I adjust it? Half the time I can’t even see where my character is because the camera keeps snapping to these weird angles.

On the bright side, the OST is great, just like the original.

Too bad the game turned out this way. I will try to power through the story in the hopes that there is a gold nugget at the end, but rarely do such hopes pay off.

Let me begin by saying that this was an absolute blast to play and is personally my GoTY. It's a very polished ARPG experience similar to Nioh.

I did not expect to enjoy the story much but I was pleasantly surprised. It's a fairly straightforward revenge story but it's done well. I was actually interested in all the scraps of lore I found to try and make sense of the motivations of the antagonist. In hindsight though, I do think some things brought the overall experience down. One such event is the reveal of the real villain almost halfway through, which really killed the twist itself. I suspect the reason the devs thought this would be a strong point is because they assumed people would be more attached to the question as to why this person did what they did. There are also quite a few things that seem like they contradict each other if you aren't familiar with Neople's earlier game called Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO) since it takes place in the same universe. For those not familiar with DFO, the story seems extremely vague and by the end looks borderline nonsensical based on the events that unfolded.

But the story isn't what you buy this for. It's the combat. It's absolutely phenomenal. Khazan has 3 weapon types that he can specialize in - Dual Wield, Greatsword and Spear. Each of them have a very distinct playstyle. Each weapon has a fleshed out skill tree and there is a common node for additional ability upgrades as well. The combat heavily incentivizes you to string combos together and not just spam R1 and dodge.

There's an incredible feeling of power progression. Not many games can do this right. The bosses in the first half are quite brutal owing to your lack of understanding of the mechanics, not having core abilities to shape your build and well, lower loot rarity. But once you do have the aforementioned items figured out and sorted, even the toughest bosses become punching bags if you engage with the combat system the way it is intended.

The gear system feels great without showering you with loot that you need to look at every 10 minutes. The usual rarities exist here but you can only get up to Epic rarity (Unique really since you only get epic by the last 2-3 missions) on an NG playthrough. Common → Unique increasing in rarity gives you a linear increase in the amount of random attributes on the item. Epic and Legendary have 3 random attributes and they get fixed attributes on top of that (ones that cannot be rerolled). There are also set bonuses and these are really well done imo. I don't really think I've seen a useless set at all. I ran through with mixed gear sets usually 4pc-2pc-2pc (4pc-2pc-2pc-2pc by the end) but 7pc/8pc set effects usually give you an additional ability or two on the skill tree and this is something you only get by wearing the set, you cannot get this through the skill tree normally.

The drip is unmatched though. Armor sets and weapons look really cool.

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Now, given all of the above I do think it's a fantastic game but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there are a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problems. Forgive me for the absolute wall of rant that's about to come your way.

This is pathetic. There's legit a single mission that has good level design. Let me walk you through the average level in Khazan: you start from a checkpoint, you see a shortcut gate that you cannot open, you progress through the level and you reach a long corridor with an elevator on the side, the elevator takes you back to the earlier gate allowing you to open it. Wow that's great right for exploration? No. The thing is there's already a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ checkpoint at the other end of the corridor on the top so what the ♥♥♥♥ was the point of the shortcut in the first place? On top of this, the missions themselves look ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bland af. They've somehow managed to bring back the brown filter from the PS3 era. Everything looks hopelessly drab.

Now people will come out of their caves to tell you how this has an incredible variety in monsters and you know what? I will give them that. But the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problem is that the majority of the content has the same 10 enemies and the really unique ones barely show up. I have done every single side mission and some of the most unique normal enemies have appeared a grand total of 3 times. What the ♥♥♥♥ Neople? I know you love your 3 different types of skeleton archers and the human variant but can we please get something else in these levels?

The bosses are honestly the most egregious part of the whole thing. Sure you get amazing unique bosses for main missions but the side missions are absolute reused trash. I hated it when Nioh did it but it can get away with it because it has far superior combat depth. Here you fight a new boss in a main mission only to encounter it again on the very next side mission. The issue doesn't even end there—the enemy variety that exists goes down only because the devs keep reusing the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ movesets on different enemies AND BOSSES. I will list down a bit of this abhorrent design below:

• Yetuga (Boss) - Yeturak (Same boss, different color, 1 new grab attack) - Netherworld Jocko
  
• Rangkus (Boss) - Bringkus (Literally the same thing)
  
• Viper (Boss) - Xaldin (Boss - Just Viper Phase 1) - Mutated Xilence (Boss - Just Viper Phase 2) - Double Edged Butcher (Common Enemy - Viper Phase 1)
  
• Volbino (Boss) - Specter of Bhangau (Same boss but can now teleport)

and the list continues.

Some of the side mission bosses are just straight up common enemies with a massive health bar. This is beyond unbelievable.

Another issue is the way the combat system is structured. At the beginning it genuinely is a slog because you cannot do anything other than dodge, brink guard/reflection and attack. You won't have enough mastery points to unlock skills to do combos with so you're stuck with a barebones combat system. This makes things extremely uninteresting. For comparison, Nioh at the start already has access to 4 weapons (2 melee + 2 ranged), 3 stances for each melee weapon, Ki Pulse and Living Weapon. This makes sure that even when you don't have a specific build going on with sets and abilities and so on, you are at least open to choices in how you play, which is significantly lacking here.

My next issue is how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless elemental damage is. Any elemental imbuement is just a flat increase in damage. Each different element does have an associated ailment that can be inflicted on the enemy. Bosses are weak to certain elements but their resistance to ailments itself is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ high that practically you will never be able to build up to an ailment during the course of the fight. This means that you would use the weakness element only for pure damage. Poison damage is close to worthless. This is not even a new thing, most ARPGs and soulslike games have this, just copy it. I do not understand how they've failed on such a simple thing.

My last gripe is the fact that you can only reroll attributes on a weapon. There is no infusion of weapons thereby allowing you to inherit perks from other weapons and so on. This makes it just a slot machine where you hope you get the thing you want with enough lacrima used as fuel.

While it may seem like I absolutely hate this based on my complaints, that is not the case. I am willing to overlook many issues considering that this is their first game of this type and the fact that it runs extremely well on PC. It was an incredibly fun experience so much so that I tried to get all the cheevos in a single playthrough. I hope and pray that we get a DLC soon as well as a sequel announcement.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I did not expect this game to be this fun. I bought this game initially only because I loved the artstyle but the gameplay is fantastic. Its a roguelite, has decent progression and an amazing coop experience.

I was a little scared about the up-down movement in the game since I felt like it would affect combat but the depth perception issues are not really a thing. The game is very lax on the vertical alignment needed between you and the enemy to deal damage to them. The story though is pretty boring and past the first few cutscenes i ended up not wanting to engage with it at all.

Played 4 hours non-stop with my friend. Reached the second area and got brutally destroyed by the third boss but I Absolum-tely recommend this. 8/10.

UPDATE:
I have now an additional 12 hours in the game. There are too much yap fest quests between the good part of the game which are the bosses. The coop feature is absolutely abysmal, way too much desync issues. The localization problems only increase the further you go into the game. After tens of hours with the open world, this is functionally no different from a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ubisoft openworld. The combat is the only thing that still holds any weight but there is only so much it can carry the game when you have so few bosses. I still stand by the review that the bosses are the best thing in the game.

The stealth sections are some of the most boring and slow segments I have ever played in a game. Sure you can avoid it but anytime you naturally come across it as a result of your exploration you will loathe the whole segment.

The biggest problem here is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ UI. This piece of ♥♥♥♥ is absolutely horrendous. This is the straw that broke it. I couldnt stand with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ notifications which are hidden under 15 different menu layers. Who designed this? Fire that guy.

Final review after completing 90% of region 1 and 30% of region 2: 6/10.

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Honestly, it’s quite good for a F2P game. The overworld is mostly just a collectathon like Genshin, i.e., finding chests for jade. But the combat and the bosses are legitimately good. The game is difficult on Legend difficulty, and I think this is what most people should pick when they start their character. The story is goofy, and you can tell they've leaned into the heavy cultivation tropes here. Overall, it feels like a labour of love.

I have a few gripes about the game, mainly the battle pass being P2W in the early game because it gives you access to +1 (+2 if you get the ultimate battle pass) healing flasks. Other than that, the performance seems to be quite poor, tbh. The last sort of negative, at least for now, is that I hate the level gating and story blockers that have been put in for this release. I hope this is not a trend that continues for future patches.

Overall, pretty good. 7.5/10. Worth playing.

Do you remember when you unlocked that shortcut in Dark Souls from Undead Parish to Firelink Shrine? Now imagine that feeling but as a whole game. That's what this game is.

In the sea of Souls games that have tried to replicate the magic that Dark Souls gave us, I think only AI Limit has truly succeeded in its endeavours. Don't get me wrong, we have countless Soulslikes that have given us tough challenges and iconic bosses, but almost none of them have remotely as good level design as Dark Souls. This is something that even FROM's later games have struggled to live up to (I'm looking at you, Dark Souls 2). The level design here is top-notch, dare I say on par with and in some areas even exceeding Dark Souls in quality.

The combat is satisfying, and I really enjoy that they didn’t go down the stamina management route. The sync meter is supposed to be your pseudo stamina, but it functions the opposite way. It rewards being aggressive with more damage, and making mistakes will drain your damage dealt. Very reminiscent of Bloodborne's rally mechanic (although not the same), like others here have reviewed. There are plenty of weapons to discover over the course of the game, but I wish the weapons had more variations in movesets. It's very easy for weapons in the same archetype to feel the same during gameplay, even though they have unique skills.

While I personally don’t see it as an issue, I think most people nowadays have come to expect really difficult bosses, and for any seasoned Souls player, this is not going to be a challenge. The bosses are a cakewalk, mostly trivialized by how easy it is to parry them. SERIOUSLY, the parry and the piercing claw are literally the only two abilities you will need in the game to destroy all the bosses.

The story is actually not as vague and nondescript as in Dark Souls. There are plenty of dialogues, and the main character is voiced as well. The NPC questlines are fairly easy to follow and are honestly great. You don’t have to sit hunched over and read all the item descriptions in order to understand the story, as it’s explained pretty well through conversations and some records scattered in key areas. It’s interesting, that’s what I’ll say.

I do think that they dropped the ball on the final boss and the secret boss though. They were meant to be spectacle fights, but even despite that, they don’t really do much and are quite poor in terms of attacks and animations, and even the arena sucks. It really felt like they ran out of steam with the bosses by the end, but I really won’t hold it against them because the rest of the game exceeded my expectations and transported me back to 2010. It is evident with the fact that I spent 25 hours playing this game over the last 3 days.

I give this a 9/10. I am really looking forward to what these devs have cooking in terms of DLC as well as their next project.

I really love this game and I have over 400 hours in it, most of it on Playstation. The game on PC is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Easy Anti cheat keeps crashing the damn game everytime I open the AMD overlay and it marks AMD driver files as invasive. ♥♥♥♥ THE GAME AND ♥♥♥♥ YOU EMBARK.

I dont need to write a lengthy review for this. This is an amazing story and you should play it. NOW.

Update: I have changed my review to negative after experiencing the abortion that is episode 8.


What. WHAT THE ACTUAL ♥♥♥♥ WAS THAT RETARDED ENDING?

"Invisigal was working for me all along".
*twirls moustache*

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Went from a 10/10 to a 5/10. Seriously. THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DOG? IS THAT THE BEST YOU COULD DO?

This game just isn’t for me unfortunately. I tried the server slam and it felt like a slog. People told me the full game would be much better because of the loot, and that the server slam was just a horizontal slice of it. No, it’s still crap.

To be fair, the game is polished, and I didn’t encounter any bugs during either the server slam or the full release. It looks amazing and runs great on my rig. But my main issue is that the loot is boring af. Also, when i'm not PvPing, it genuinely feels like Death Stranding with the amount of open terrain that I need to traverse. The UI is horrendous for a game that constantly makes you do inventory management, and the monetization is pretty aggressive for a paid game. The ARCs have decent designs but its not like I'm particularly excited about fighting them either.

Regardless of my opinion on it, this game does seem like a good entry point for the extraction genre. I just hope more studios keep experimenting with this space so that one day a game comes along that I actually enjoy and can make my main game.

I really wanted to like it since I love Embark, but this one’s a refund for me.

Let me start off by saying, I should've played this sooner. I'm almost 2/3rds of my way through the game and I've interacted heavily with the majority of its systems. I feel I can write a pretty thorough review on it.

Combat: This is the most fun I've had with hack and slash combat since DMC V. The skill trees are massive, and although most hack and slash games have a reputation for just having punching bags for enemies, at least fighting basic enemies in this game, even on normal, isn't completely braindead. Now I'm not saying it's anywhere near close to Souls games in difficulty, but it requires you to be at least paying attention when fighting enemies. The combat also kind of feels like Sekiro for the most part, with the parrying and all the tools that are available at your disposal. Skill points are awarded generously just playing through the campaign, so you won't have any issues unlocking the skills you want and it's more than likely you might not even use half the options you have available. But kudos to the devs for at least giving us options.

Bosses: The bosses look great and have well-telegraphed movesets. My only fault with this is that the bosses are mostly pushovers, at least up until the point I've played (Abyss Leviore). They have barely any health. You can also change the difficulty to hard once you've started the game but its very clear that the devs balanced this around NG+. The bosses are just damage sponges in this mode. I would not recommend playing on hard on your first playthrough.

Music: Inject this straight into my veins. The OSTs in the game are certified bangers and Silent Street (Type A) is my personal favourite.

Side Quests and World Building: Side quests and lore tabs really flesh out the world and give us enough backstory, often in broken pieces. I don't think it's the most well-written, but they're pretty decent. The rewards are mostly just ♥♥♥♥ really. Some of them have outfits as rewards, but the good ones are yet again locked behind really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ photography quests.

Level Design: Now to my biggest pain points with the game. There are 2 whole levels in the game which you can classify as sort of "open-worldy" in nature. The problem is that both of these are desert terrains that have barely anything in them, and there is nothing interesting here other than the 10-20 outfits there. I just wish they had made more self-contained semi-linear zones like Matrix 11 & Eidos 7. The chests are mostly just busy work since they offer nothing that you can't just buy from a shop in the main hub.

Narrative: The narrative is the weakest part of this entire game and it is extremely predictable. The dialogue sometimes feels very natural and other times you wonder if the writers have actually spoken to real people in their lives. An example of this is when there is banter between Lily and Adam,it feels real, but then at the same time when you have NPCs talking like robots (no pun intended). I also feel the game could've benefitted from not having exposition dumps when the levels, the memory stick drops, and logs often suffice in making you understand the story. Having lore drops where people speak on end just to make you understand the plot feels insulting at times.

But despite my issues with the game, I think it is fantastic. I give this an 8.5/10.

UPDATE: I've finally finished the game after 40 hours with all the side quests and the optional area. That ending was great and the penultimate and final boss fights were ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic. The score is has been bumped up to 8.5 to reflect this. I cant wait for Stellar Blade 2.