Jens

Platinum #220: Tokyo Dark: Remembrance

Not really that much to say about this one to be honest. It's a pretty short and simple VN-style game with some veeery loose point&click aspects thrown into it. The story is completely alright, at least if you keep in mind how small-scope this game is, pretty close to a little crime detective story with a pinch of supernatural shenanigans. The trophies aren't too bad overall either, not a whole lot to clean up after a casual playthrough for us due to the guides on this site.

That's actually pretty much it to be honest. If you're in the mood for a short-ish VN, I don't think there's really much to dislike in this one. It won't blow your mind, but I think it exactly delivers what one would expect from it with a reasonable approach.

Well well well... Guess it's that day again, huh?

Happy Birthday!

Love you buddy, hope you'll have a wonderful day!

Happy Birthday PooPooMan!

Platinum #219: Void Terrarium

Got this game from my #1 bestie @eigen-space and played it alongside her, so thanks for both once more my friend!

A pretty interesting roguelike dungeon-crawler kind of game. It has some other gimmicks as well, but it's probably better to not spoil them.

It can get rough a few times, the difficulty has some spikes. But with an aggressive approach, thorough exploration of dungeons and crafting for permanent stat upgrades, it was always a neat experience for us. The RNG effects can be worked down by taking time and leveling up.

Recommending it is difficult, because everything about it is so niche. Look it up, that gives you way more information than I could provide. All I'll say is: We liked it!

Platinum #218: Lost Judgment

Well, well, well... where do I begin with this one... Probably announcing it as my 10th Yakuza-ish platinum, that's a fun start!

I think if we look at all Yakuza games in a vacuum, without thinking about the influences of games on each other, Lost Judgment is most likely the best Yakuza game to date. It's super fluid, the combat finally feels as visceral and responsive as in Yakuza 0 and Kiwami. Don't get me wrong, the Dragon Engine in newer games was mind-blowing, but the combat felt so... delayed, ever so slightly. At worst it felt like programming a combo and watching the character do it. But this one takes it back to the roots, and it's great. Supported by insane visuals yet again, this level of detail just never gets old.

The story pretty much can't get any better. There's two things I disliked about Yakuza stories (in a funny way though): mustache-twirling "I've been the bad guy all along!" plot twist villains, and characters getting killed by offscreen gunshots. Neither of these things happened  It constructs a story that starts folding into each other from three separate angles and it's pretty entertaining. One moment you think the mustache-twirling villain arrives, later he turns into one of the most sympathetic monsters in gaming history. I think people could watch a complete cut of all cutscenes on Youtube and have a great time!

And the whole completion package is good as well. There are tons of minigames, so of course some miss the mark for players (for me it's Baseball, it can finally go home). But every game was at the very minimum a good amount of fun, most were more than that. Nothing took a craaazy long time or was annoyingly difficult, the worst ones were very manageable for sure. A nice return yet again, after Yakuza 6's super simplistic completion. This one feels like you've conquered a Yakuza game again.

It's difficult to remove the Kiryu and Majima saga from the older games. Seems unfair adding it to the rating, seems unfair leaving it out. So in my overall "Yakuza Tier List"..... I think this one shares the #1 spot with Yakuza 0. If you want to play a Yakuza game in your life, and your 100% sure that you'll only play one, pick Lost Judgment.

Platinum #217: Cris Tales

Well, this one will be a bit of a 50:50 thing for me. I'll start with the positive half of it.

It's a cute, small-scope turn-based RPG, we don't get a lot of those these days, so that's a big plus. The art style is neat, the story is completely fine and the pace was pleasant. It doesn't overstay its welcome and isn't over in a flash either, it has the perfect length in my opinion. Overall the game was pretty alright, we definitely enjoyed it for what it is. As a medium-sized RPG it did its job.

But then there are the bugs... Some skills of some characters caused frequent soft-locks in combat, that was beyond frustrating. In addition to that some new content that came with a patch messed with some of the trophies, making it a bit of an obstacle course around eggshells avoiding trophies becoming unachievable. These bugs really decreased our fun at some points of our playthrough, that was a bummer.

Shout-out to @eigen-space for caring a great deal about her guide for this game and updating it to the newest content. If you are interested in it, don't be scared by those bugs. Her guide covers all problems now and will maneuver you around them, there is a solution to avoid every single one of them. Because of that I think I can still recommend it if you like turn-based RPGs, for sure. If we still enjoyed it well enough with some annoying bugs, any other RPG fan has an even bigger chance enjoying it without those

Tfw you got a Christmas present from the best buddy on the planet

https://ibb.co/W0rBdt2

My initial plan was listing nothing but platinums, a little counter if you will. But I'll definitely make an exception for this one, because this one will be quite memorable for me I think.

I just completed King's Quest and will now break it down into single chapters, because they are very different, more so than one might think.

Chapter 1 was probably my favorite. It reminded me of an Artifex Mundi game, just without the hidden object puzzles. Basically an "Adventure Lite" that won't get you stuck too often, if at all. That was pretty good stuff. And it is the first introduction to some surprisingly amusing humor and seriously great voice acting. The timing and delivery of the jokes kind of reminded me of Shrek, and I can not tell you why  Probably because of almost every character being fun, while not being annoying (unless they are supposed to be annoying). Fun time!

Chapter 2 on the other hand... was pure garbage. They removed the small puzzles, the world you can walk around in (kind of) and the light-hearted, quirky humor and replaced it with a

I don't know what they were smoking, to me they literally removed everything fun and replaced it with misery. That made me anxious about the rest to be honest. I bailed out of this chapter 20 minutes in, just to play it over with a guide. I wanted it out of my life as quickly as possible.

Chapter 3 and 4 picked it back up though. I'm listing both together, because I really can't decide which one I liked more. Chapter 3 brought the tone of the story back, especially the fun interactions between characters. The fact that it was more of a dating sim than an Adventure was something I had to get used to, but I did  Chapter 4 boils the character stuff down to one character, pretty much. But it adds a LOT of puzzles, it's basically a puzzle-gauntlet. I liked both things the same after the awful second chapter, kind of like a breath of fresh air. So I can't really place one above the other.

Chapter 5 gets a little weird, it throws in some meta-elements. Breaking the fourth wall on occasion, purposely messing with the previous story, odd stuff. But considering how it justifies doing so, and therefore wraps up the background story of the overall series... I liked this one too. I appreciate the attempt of doing something wild (even if I would've preferred something more "down to earth") and it was a good way acting as the closing chapter.

So overall I liked it, actually more than I anticipated to be honest. If you find the season pass for all episodes in a sale - and it is quite often, even right now - I would recommend this one to pretty much everyone to be honest. They try so much different stuff over all these chapters, one has to land  Unless you desperately need action in your life

Platinum #215: Hades

Well... this will be something. Because I can't remember the last game that disappointed me as much as this one. But let's start with the positives.

Next to Children of Morta it's the only roguelike I've played with a constructed story and actual characters. That wasn't too shabby. And the gameplay itself was OK, fast-paced hack&slash action. Not too flashy, but it got the job done in the beginning. It runs pretty smooth, the art style is pretty alright too. Having a busted run is just a pleasant as in other rogulikes too.

But well... it kind of messes up close to everything else for me... but keep in mind that I'm a roguelike snob  

To me learning a roguelike is like learning a language. At first you lose all the time and think "How am I supposed to win this?". But you understand more and more, and improve as well. This dual learning curve is pretty much the core fun for me. But this "learning curve" barely exists in Hades, because everything is bare bones. All boons are way too much alike, it boils down to "Deal XX% more damage and add X status effect to your attack". That gets old real fast, it doesn't make the runs different enough at all.

Adding to this is the fact that I hated those boons having rarity attached to them. It just doesn't feel very fair and / or rewarding when good boons appear in shitty rarity all the time - and are therefore trash - while bad ones are epic - and are probably still trash. The only boons that made a meaningful difference to me were the hammer upgrades for your weapon, and boons that raised your damage on your most-used attack. That's it, the rest was pretty much cosmetics in the worst case. And that really messed with my experience of "learning builds". Was the boon just trash, or was the bad rarity the issue? This issue gets solved later on by improving the chance of rarer boons, but that was way too little too late. It gets slightly fixed by the permanent upgrades you can unlock in the mirror, but those advantages came when I was already sick of this game.

I disliked every single boss fight. They started out as being challenging, as they should be in a roguelike. But after that they continued being annoying. And considering that you fight the same four bosses every single time.... that's pretty annoying alright.

But the biggest issue is that there's no "mystery" to it. Once you beat Hades, the grind begins. You don't unlock ANYTHING meaningful in this game. No significant new bosses, no alternate paths, nothing. You pretty much start the grind after 2 or 3 Hades kills at most. And that was beyond boring. I used God Mode after the first few Hades kills to start the keepsake grind (clearing many battles with each of the 25 keepsakes), just to reach the meat and potatoes of this game while making progress on that too. But there was no meat and potatoes, it kept being asparagus and cauliflower... Increasing the difficulty through those negative run-modifiers didn't mean anything to me, the core game was 99% the same.

And here's my last major issue with it: The endgame tasks all suck extremely hard. Almost everything is based around giving NPCs items to trigger side-quest-related dialogue. And that is the most boring endgame I've ever seen in a roguelike. Not only do you have to grind the items, you can only give them one out of 7 - 9 necessary items at once. After that you have to reach them all over again (bad if those NPCs are RNG based within a run) and annoying in the starting zone, because they sometimes just aren't there, or you can't give them an item when they are talking to someone else. For whatever reason. These side quests are all ridiculously random too. Half the time I wasn't even sure about meeting the requirements. You just keep talking to them and wait for some kind of feedback. Talking to the same NPC 8+ times to wait for a nebulous trigger is just annoying beyond believe. Really poor in my opinion.

So yeah, I kinda hated it to be honest. There's an OK game hidden in here, especially if you only care about gameplay, less so about completion. But to me completion is essential in a roguelike, and therefore this one failed spectacularly. If they would've stitched 5 runs together and made it a simple, one-run game it would've been absolutely alright. But this pointless, grindy and RNG-based repetition gets old way too fast. Sadly that's 70-80% of the game right there.

Platinum #214: The Pathless

Got this one as a freebie from @Inuty, so thanks once again

This one started a little rough for me. In this game you basically fly around the map and look for tiny puzzle locations scattered all over the place. You could summarize 90% of these as "switch puzzles", they never got too difficult or annoying whatsoever. They either reward you with a gem thingie you need just a few of to progress the story, or some other upgrades for your general mobility. And I was very confused in the beginning. You fly around in this search-vision that makes the screen go cyan, while looking for red blobs on the map. Everything looked the same and I had no clue what I was supposed to do The movement felt very limited (or rather I thought I was doing something wrong), finding things was a gamble (for me at least), the general way to progress was confusing me.

But once you get used to it (or make @Mesopithecus explain it to you) it does get better over time. Over time you unlock 10+ "double jumps" you can perform while gliding around with your eagle, and every single one makes the game more and more pleasant to play. Adding some of these very convenient boss upgrades / 100% zone completion rewards to the mix, my annoyances got smaller and smaller as time went on. So just bear with it for a while, things will definitely get smoother.

It doesn't take long at all, it took me ~10 hours. The collectibles aren't as bad as I thought at first because you don't need all of them, which I thought for a while. The higher you can fly, the easier it'll be to spot things you need to collect. You do need a bit of patience for sure, because your overall movement does stay at a somewhat low level. But in can be pretty cathartic once you're in the correct mindset for it. The visuals and sound contribute a lot to that as well.

So yeah, I think I would recommend it. It's pretty much Journey with a lot of aerial movement  If you are in an explorative mood and want to zone out collecting stuff while solving some bite-sized puzzles along the way, this is a good one to pick.

And you can pet the eagle whenever you want. Nuff said.

Platinum #213: Tales of Arise

Because this game is still brand new I'll keep it even shorter than usual. I don't want to risk even the tiniest spoiler. This was practically our fourth Tales game after Berseria, Vesperia and Zestiria. Tales of Arise might be on our last spot in the "Tales ranking", but it's still a super decent game overall.

If you know other Tales games you'll have to get used to the different tone a little. It's more grounded and "serious" this time, most of the time I'd even call it dour. Other than the glorious owl there's very little comic relieve overall. Which isn't bad, but unexpected. And I'll only say this about the story: It takes a few convoluted turns, just to tell an overall quite simplistic story. Personally I think they could've left a few of these story paths out to make it less unnecessarily complicated, while still ending up with the basic premise. But that might just be me, it's not too complicated to mess with the story in a huge way.

Not much to say about the gameplay either, it's still a Tales game in this regard  Super fluid, pretty flashy, nice to look at! The enemies get a little too tanky for my taste, but it never got too annoying. Other than that the overall completion started feeling like a normal JRPG - journey after a while. Not too difficult (just minor exceptions), long but not extremely so (I think we took somewhere between 70 and 90 hours) and a fair share of stuff to do. Stuff I once more don't want to spoil

Feels kind of pointless writing this while keeping so much to myself now that I think about it  But I don't think this game needs much of an explanation. Do you like Tales? You'll get used to the changes, the core is still intact! Do you like JRPGs? You'll find enough of the things you like in this one too! It might not blow your mind, but it will definitely deliver a really solid, fun time for sure.

Platinum #211: Shing!

Guess it's better to start with a little disclaimer, out of fairness. I bought this game blind, I only got it because the name was mildly amusing to me. I was expecting something like The Messenger or Guacamelee, Platforming + Combat. But it really wasn't, and therefore I went in disappointed from the start. That really dropped my overall enjoyment, not the game's fault though.

It's a super simple beat'em up, like old NES games, Streets of Rage for example. You walk from left to right, beat up all enemies, continue, rinse and repeat. That's basically it, there's close to no variation at all. The game offers you two different control schemes. Using the right analogue stick for attacks - don't use this one. It's the most tedious thing ever, stick to buttons if possible! I really hope the PS4 got that control option patched in too...

It's just very, very basic. The humor didn't land for me, it gets repetitive real fast, enemy patterns were more annoying than challenging and the combat didn't really get satisfying. But once I got my head in the game, shook of my disappointment and started focusing I stopped hating it, it was passable by the end.

It's very short (7 levels, roughly 15-30 minutes each) and can get slightly challenging, especially in some challenge rooms. Mastering levels is fairer than one might expect. You need to beat the level quickly, while taking little damage and earning a certain amount of "battle style points". Thankfully you don't need all three at once, and you can restart checkpoints when you feel like having screwed things up. Mastering levels worried me, but I did all of them first try after beating the game. If a noob like me can do it, you can do it too

Dunno. If you just want a retro beat'em up, maybe. It's on sale somewhat frequently, currently at 5$ even. If you know what you're getting into and like this kind of game you might actually get something out of it. But if you need a bit of fresh gameplay changes here and there, Shing ain't your Thing.