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lordgodalming

Chinese CRPGs are my new special interest

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4.4 stars

Average score of 40 user reviews

A SNES-era JRPG for the Ages 0

[This review is based on the Japanese PS4 version.]I picked up DQXI at a used game shop in Japan for about $25 USD in May 2018, a few months before its US release. I mostly bought the game out of curiosity and a desire to continue improving my Japanese. I was not prepared for this game to surpass God of War and Monster Hunter World to become my favorite of 2018. But here we are.First impressions are a bit lopsided. Immediately you get the visuals, which are gorgeous. Characters have a soft, orga...

5 out of 5 found this review helpful.

Devil's Due 0

I got this game as part of a Humble Bundle package, and I fired it up with the thought of playing for a few minutes just to see what it was like. A couple hours later I turned it off with a vague mixture of fondness and annoyance.Unholy Heights is an apartment sim / tower defense game with some cute ideas and hideous difficulty spikes. It feels like a free-to-play game in that it forces you to "grind" out money for long periods of time in which you are essentially idle at the computer. A FTP gam...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

Nier & FFX-2 had a baby, and her name is Lightning. 0

Final Fantasy XIII was, in my opinion, a great game, and even a great Final Fantasy game. I know a lot of people disagree with me for legitimate reasons, so I won’t bother defending it anymore. Besides, if you’re here reading about Lightning Returns, you must have thought FFXIII and XIII-2 were at least passable. Otherwise you’re just trolling and I will ask you to leave us in peace. Go back to threatening COD developers’ families on Twitter because they nerfed your favor...

2 out of 2 found this review helpful.

A shock for series vets, but still great fun 0

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the game that sold me a Playstation 3. Five years later, my PS3 library has crested 70 games, and ToD is still the game I pull off the shelf when I’m looking for an evening of pure, thoughtless fun. Having bought and played the entire Future series (ToD, QfB, and CiT), I was thrilled when Insomniac announced the follow-up to A Crack in Time…until I saw it in motion.Ratchet & Clank All 4 One was presented as a cutesy 4-player co-op game, at...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

Dark Souls, but Harder 0

*MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*Players familiar with Dark Souls won’t notice much of a difference besides a few lines of new NPC dialogue, at least until they reach Darkroot Garden, a shadowy valley beneath the Undead Parish. From here there are three tasks that must be accomplished in order to open the way to the DLC, after which a giant hand covered in eyeballs and teeth appears to snatch you into the brand new realm of Oolacile.One of the most genius aspects of Dark Souls was the world map. Every are...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

A game that's not afraid to take risks 0

*This review contains spoilers for Final Fantasy VII*I still remember the first time I played Final Fantasy VII and reached the point in the story when Cloud figures out that he has been living a lie. No, it’s not when he goes on a romantic Ferris wheel excursion with Barrett in the Golden Saucer. It’s the moment he realizes he’s not the elite SOLDIER First Class he has pretended to be throughout the game. That heroic past actually belonged to a guy named Zack, who was Cloud’s role model and ev...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

This is DMC5. Deal with it. 2

I have now played and finished all five console-based Devil May Cry games. I do not count myself among the hardcore superfans who do speedruns or complete Bloody Palace mode holding the controller with their feet or whatever, but, as I say, I’ve played every game and I feel like that gives me the right to make the following statement:DmC is a Devil May Cry game.In fact, I suspect that when upset (read: tiresome) fans of the series say that DmC is NOT a Devil May Cry game, what they really mean i...

1 out of 3 found this review helpful.

The original steals the show 1

Late in the PS2’s lifecycle I picked up a little package off eBay that included three games by director Hideki Kamiya: Okami, Viewtiful Joe, and Devil May Cry. The one I really wanted was Okami (and it was without a doubt the best of the three) but once I’d finished Amaterasu’s adventure, I gave the other two a go as well. Viewtiful Joe was tough but mostly fair and full of fascinating gameplay ideas, while Devil May Cry…There’s no nice way to say it: Devil May Cry kicked my ass. I made it past ...

2 out of 2 found this review helpful.

More Demon's Souls...Hurray! 0

I had a 100+ hour affair with Demon’s Souls back in 2009, so I was elated when a second game was announced. There was a lot of high talk about how Dark Souls was the “spiritual successor” to Demon’s Souls rather than a true sequel, but the first gameplay trailer made such hair-splitting unnecessary—except maybe to SCE’s copyright lawyers. Dark Souls is Demon’s Souls 2. And like any sequel should be, it is bigger, harder, and more impressive than the original. Is it better? I’m not sure, actually...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Final Fantasy X-2-2 1

Let’s get this right out of the way: Final Fantasy XIII has become the internet’s whipping child. Thousands of people who have never pressed so much as Start to begin that game moan and complain about how it was too linear; how it took 25 hours to “get good.” It is now the symbol of not just Final Fantasy’s and Square Enix’s ruination, but that of all Japanese game development (I have a sneaking suspicion that Resident Evil 6 will only prolong the argument).And where do I stand on XIII? I though...

2 out of 2 found this review helpful.

A Good Game I Didn't Like 0

As a teacher and compassionate human being, I always like to preface negative criticism with positive. In this case, that’s pretty easy because Darksiders does a lot well. The art design is colorful and fun, if largely stolen from the Warcraft universe and not altogether consistent with the grand and humorless story. The voice acting is likewise well done, although with vets like Troy Baker and Mark Hamill leading the charge, the voices are, like the art, very familiar. (Mark Hamill even said th...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Sparkly yet satisfying 0

*This review contains spoilers for Final Fantasy X*The first prerendered cinematic in Final Fantasy X shocked gamers with a fast-paced game of what looked like handball, played entirely inside a sphere of water by players who could breathe underwater. More shocking still was the heavy metal soundtrack behind the movie. Beyond that opening scene, however, Final Fantasy X delved into matters of tradition, sacrifice, religion, love, and family with surprising grace. Plus it had one of the most sati...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A Beautiful Rhythm Platformer 0

The original Prince of Persia appeared on home computers in 1989. It was designed to be a brief game, with an hour's time limit imposed on the player from the beginning. Current speed runs through the game on youtube reduce that time dramatically, ranging from 10-18 minutes.   However, surviving for even that long was much easier said than done. The prince had to navigate a Persian (Iranian) palace to save his love from an evil sorcerer, Jafar. Each room in the palace contained bottomless pit...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

An Ambitious Experiment 0

Few game developers have résumés as diverse as Peter Molyneux, current Creative Director of Microsoft Games Europe. A few games early in his career made waves critically and commercially—Populous and Dungeon Keeper spring to mind—but he did not truly blossom as an auteur until he founded Lionhead Studios.The first game out of Lionhead, Black & White, was to be Molyneux’s most ambitious title to date. In fact, I might argue that it is still his most ambitious game, which is saying something a...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A Missed Opportunity 1

I find it very interesting that many reviewers panned Dante’s Inferno for its “gratuitous” nudity and sexuality, while at the same praising the “creative,” extreme, and often misogynistic violence. Apparently, shoving a scythe through the face of a pleading sinner is great entertainment, but the presence of nude men and women crosses some line of good taste.Not that I am advocating Dante’s Inferno’s depictions of nudity any more than I am advocating its use of violence. In my opinion, MOST of th...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A game with good lightsaber mechanics? And Billy Dee Williams?! 0

Jedi Outcast follows Kyle Katarn, the hero from the two previous Dark Forces games, and his copilot, Jan Ors. Now, I have to admit, Outcast is a fairly generic shooter for about the first seven levels, mainly because the game farts around that long before finally giving you a lightsaber and Force powers. However, gameplay is so vastly improved from the previous titles that you'll hardly notice. Force powers are no longer controlled by the Function keys on your keyboard, which is particularly hel...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Better than most current Indy games 0

The MSDOS version of The Last Crusade came out alongside the film of the same name in 1989 and retailed for $80. That's right. $80. And you thought new console games were expensive. I played this game on my dad's 286 PC with a 40MB hard drive and 12k RAM. It was glorious. The Last Crusade was one of the earliest games featuring a full 256 color VGA palette, and LucasArts used the colors to the game's benefit. The Last Crusade is a classic adventure game in which you direct Indiana Jones around h...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A True PS1 Classic 0

Chrono Cross is the sequel to the 1995 Super Nintendo RPG, Chrono Trigger. You play as Serge, a young boy with beach clothes and spiky blue hair. A couple hours into the game, you discover a second world identical to Serge's, except that in this world, Serge died when he was ten years old. The remaining Serge is being hunted by a man with a cat's face (cleverly named Lynx) because Serge unknowingly holds the key to saving or destroying all worlds. If you can't tell already, Chrono Cross was made...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Cute, funny, and harmless 0

 October 31 marks the true end of summer, called “Samhain” by ancient Celtic tribes, and is also the day when a doorway is supposedly thrown wide between the spirit and physical worlds. As is typical with ancient holidays, modern Western culture has buried the old traditions under piles of brightly colored packaging and commercial excess. But I’m not complaining. Any excuse to wear my Superman/Indiana Jones/Jedi costumes is cause for celebration in my opinion. And to help you get in the spirit ...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Castlevania IV in 3D 0

 Possibly due to the presence of one or more angry ghosts living on the second and third floors of my childhood home, I grew up being afraid of the dark and everything in it. Dracula? Scary. The mummy? Scary. The wolf man, the rancor monster, clowns, the girl from The Exorcist, zombies, Chucky, Mr. Boogedy, Carol Channing’s character in Alice in Wonderland—all such things haunted me when I tried to get to sleep every night. Which is probably why I have such strong memories of watching my friend...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

THE baseball sim for your new IBM 286 0

The year was 1989: Ghostbusters II hit theaters to mixed reviews; Milli Vanilli were still, to most people’s knowledge, singing their own songs; and the Oakland Athletics, led by “Bash Brothers” Jose Canseco and Mark Mcgwire, were on their way to a second consecutive California-only World Series.   And this time Kirk Gibson wouldn’t ruin everything with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth. Yes, 1989 sure felt like a different era, mostly as evidenced by the fact that I gave a rat’s patoo...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Summer camp for your brain 0

Psychonauts tells the story of Razputin, a gifted boy attending a summer camp for psychic children.   The game drops you and Raz into the Whispering Rock camp after a highly entertaining cinematic that introduces the counselors and several campers.   You immediately have the choice to explore the grounds and begin collecting pink arrowheads, the game’s currency, or visit Coach Oleander, a mustachioed counselor who bellows like a drill sergeant.   Choose the latter path and Oleander sucks you int...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

R&C go out on a high note 0

 So far, there have been five proper Ratchet & Clank games for home consoles (three on PS2, two on PS3), one for the Sony PSP, a Ratchet-centric arena fighter called Deadlocked, a pair of Clank games on the PSP, and the DLC episode I mentioned above. Needless to say, Ratchet & Clank have been a gaming force since they hit the scene in 2002. The secrets to their success? Responsive controls, outstanding level design, sharp and colorful graphics, witty writing and voice acting, and wildly ...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

Best in the series 0

  Insomniac Games came on the scene in 1996 with a first-person shooter called Disruptor for the original Playstation.   The story played out in corny videos starring live actors, but the game itself played smoothly and looked great for a PS1 game.   Excellent visuals continued to be a hallmark of Insomniac throughout the Playstation era with their much more widely known series starring Spyro, the flying purple dragon. In 2002 Insomniac introduced a new pair of mascots for the Playstation 2 wi...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

Night of the Living Dead + Die Hard + Godzilla 0

 Past RE games created much of their tense atmosphere by keeping you, the player, completely alone throughout the game.   Resident Evil 5 separates itself from its predecessors by giving you a partner.   You play the game as Chris Redfield, a familiar series personality, and your new partner is an African woman named Sheva Alomar.   Chris and Sheva meet in the fictional African country of Kijuju to locate and destroy a new biological weapon that the Umbrella Corporation, a corrupt pharmaceutical...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Spectacular or spectacle? 0

Bayonetta is a spectacle of a game.   The title character is a witch whose power originates from her hair, which is long enough to cover her whole body in a rigid, skin-tight suit.   Let me just repeat that: Bayonetta wears a magic suit made of her own hair.   So right from the beginning you should understand that the developers don’t mean for you to take Bayonetta too seriously.   She is not so much an R-rated seductress as a female version of Austin Powers stuck in a Twilight movie.  Bayonett...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

One of the better games you'll never play 0

 Japanese powerhouse publisher Square Enix saved most of its 2010 marketing thunder for Final Fantasy XIII, but a little over a month after that game hit western shelves, Square quietly published Nier. Online reviewers claimed to hate FFXIII for being linear, restrictive, and over-produced. Not satisfied with being wrong once, the same reviewers decided they hated Nier for exactly the opposite reasons. The only thing they got even kind of right is that Final Fantasy XIII and Nier, despite being ...

5 out of 5 found this review helpful.

Kazuma ファイト! 0

 Yakuza 3 was my first ride with Japanese gangster, Kazuma Kiriyu, as well as old Kaz’s first adventure on the Playstation 3. The first two Yakuza games appeared on the Playstation 2 in an attempt to fill the gaping void left by the unfinished Shenmue series. But if you, like most people, have never heard of Shenmue, Yakuza is also similar to a much more popular franchise: Grand Theft Auto. Storywise, Yakuza 3 picks up where its predecessors left off, and the designers wisely give new players t...

2 out of 2 found this review helpful.

Abra-ca-awesome 0

 If you haven’t played any of Traveller’s Tales’ earlier Lego game franchises—Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Batman—let me explain what they’re about. Each of these games lets you play through famous scenes from the movies they’re based on, but created entirely with Lego blocks. The characters are all built on the Lego-person template: cylindrical head, trapezoidal body, creepy hooks for hands, and big, sturdy pant legs. It’s all very, very cute. The added bonus of Lego worlds from a gaming stan...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

More than Lives Up to Its Name 0

 Little Big Planet is a sidescrolling platformer, much like the original Super Mario brothers with an added physics engine. But instead of a pair of Italian plumbers, Little Big Planet stars an adorable little mascot with the unfortunate name Sackboy. He is a tiny doll sewn together from burlap, with shiny black buttons for eyes and a wide, expressive mouth.Little Big Planet would almost certainly have crashed on takeoff without Sackboy's irresistible cuteness. Besides running around and jumping...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A Surprisingly Deep Arcade Racer 0

 Joe Danger, at its core, is an arcade racer that owes a lot to ExciteBike on the original Nintendo. Of course, current gamers demand more than ExciteBike could ever have delivered in 1986, and Joe Danger obliges them with local and online multiplayer, as well as a simple and powerful level editor/creator. But let’s focus on the single player campaign for the moment. Most downloadable titles offer up a couple hours of solid gameplay, giving completionists perhaps another 6-8 hours to earn all T...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Pure, Simple Fun 0

 The scene opens on a nighttime field.   Three cows graze peacefully, bright stars riding the black sky above them.  Dawn breaks, and rising over the horizon is not the sun but the silhouette of an enormous man wearing a crown.   Two Japanese symbols appear inside the man’s silhouette; a singing voice bellows, “KA-TA-MA-RI DA-MA-SHIIIIII!”   Rainbows explode upward from the horizon on either side of the man in the crown, and we see his face for the first time: gray, stern, and bearded.   The co...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

A Tale of Art, Beauty, and Restoration of Life 0

 Hideki Kamiya created a name for himself early in the lifecycle of the Playstation 2 with the game Devil May Cry.   It was a sword-swinging action game with tremendous style, a rare game that wanted to be cool and actually was.   The same held true for Kamiya’s next franchise, Viewtiful Joe, which chronicled the adventures of a regular American teenager who got sucked into a superhero movie to save his girlfriend.   But, pizzazz aside, both of those games were hard.   Really, really hard. Than...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

An Abusive Game You Will Love 0

 Demon’s Souls hates me.   And it hates you too.   The world in Demon’s Souls will poison you, monsters will gang up on you, and the characters who actually assist you will say things like, “Do come back alive.   I need your business.”   The game doesn’t even give you the escape of a game-over screen when you die.   Instead your character’s body vanishes, leaving a glowing soul with only half a life bar.   And when you do finally beat the game, you immediately get tossed back to the beginning on...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

Tradition and Innovation 0

 I have been waiting for Final Fantasy XIII since Square Enix released the first trailer for the game in early 2006.   Four years of salivatory anticipation put my expectations for Final Fantasy XIII through the roof—after all, this game is the reason I originally ponied up for a Playstation 3.   After all this time, can the game possibly live up to my expectations? Oh my, yes.    Final Fantasy XIII contains the perfect mixture of familiar and brand new that every successful game in the series...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

FF: Reinvented 0

 Square Enix has always aimed to reinvent the Final Fantasy series with every numbered entry.  Consequently, numbered Final Fantasy games usually offend long-time fans in some new and unforgivable way.  Final Fantasy XII took this tradition to the extreme. After a record five years in development and some production hiccups that would make Duke Nukem’s sunglasses explode, Square Enix finally delivered Final Fantasy XII in 2005.  For the first time ever the battle system was not turn-based, nor ...

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

The Pinnacle of JRPG Storytelling and Gameplay 0

  I’ll not mince words; Final Fantasy X is my favorite video game.   I remember my jaw hitting the floor the first time I saw a commercial for it in 2001.  Final Fantasy X was the reason I finally bought a Playstation 2 in 2005, and even after four years of anticipation it did not disappoint.  You play as Tidus (pronounced Tee-duss, from the Japanese “Tiida,” meaning “sun”), a glitzy celebrity athlete à la David Beckham.  Instead of soccer, though, Tidus’s sport is Blitzball, which is lik...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

FF: A Celebration 0

  The main character this time around is Zidane, a good natured bandit with a monkey's tail. At the beginning of the story Zidane is on an airship as part of a theater crew/pirate gang whose leader is a bearded pig-man with purple skin. Zidane and company are headed for Alexandria, a fortified city perched on the edge of a thousand-foot waterfall. In Alexandria, you meet an amnesiac black mage, Vivi, and a beautiful young princess, Garnett, whose mother looks like the leader of those evil blue...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

FF: A Love Story 0

In the opening hours of the game the main character, Squall Lionheart, completes a mission to become a member of SeeD, a mercenary group created to fight sorceresses, who, in the world of Final Fantasy VIII, are as reviled as pirates in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise.   After several missions as SeeDs, Squall and his pals realize one of their own team members, Rinoa, is being possessed by a time-traveling sorceress whose body is imprisoned near the moon. This is of course a ...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

Classic 0

  The main hero of Final Fantasy VII is the spiky-haired mercenary, Cloud Strife. He will always have two other members in his “party,” which is the group you use in battles.   Right away you meet Cloud’s closest friends, Barrett and Tifa, the latter of which provides a potential love interest for Cloud. There is also a gentle flower saleswoman named Aerith (or Aeris in the original translation); Red XIII, a talking dog/fox; Cid, a foul mouthed and misogynistic rocket pilot; Cait Sith, a robot c...

1 out of 1 found this review helpful.