I Think I Hate Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth (a review?)
August 17th, 2019 I think I hate Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, and I’m not sure how to balance that considering how the game is sold. Persona Q2 beats you to death with its fan service, from an intro sung by the musical talent in Persona 3, 4, and 5 to “friendship attacks” that pair your favorite characters together in little cutscenes, and as a fan of the franchise this was working for me on a number of levels. However after beating it and setting it aside for a while there was this niggling thought in the back of my head that Q2 was just…bad. So rather than making a traditional review I’m just going to talk about why I hate it, because why not? There will be some spoilers in this review. The first thing you might notice about Persona Q2 is just a feeling that there’s lack of…
Nioh 2 Alpha Impressions
May 27th, 2019 Nioh 2 was announced at E3 2018 and we haven’t heard a peep about it since. Now it seems that Team Ninja is following the same path as they did with the first game and releasing a series of alphas and betas to get help from the community as they refine their final product. An interview with one of the developers at E3 said that they were going to go “all out” to create their “true vision” of what Nioh should have been, after admittedly being a little more conservative the first time around. Let’s see what “all out” looks like. Liked It’s still Nioh: I will admit that Nioh 2 feels a little skittish after playing Devil May Cry 5 and Sekiro over the last two months, but after a while it clicked back. The difficulty, stamina focus, weapon variety, revenant graves, great art for the…
Katana ZERO Review
May 20th, 2019 Death in video games can be a weird thing, and it means different things to different people. Some take it too harshly, seeing it as a penalty that defeats one’s enjoyment of the game, while others see it as a challenge, one that demands you do better if you wish to succeed. Devolver Digital has always had a strange relationship with death in their games, most notably in Hotline Miami where death was so constant that it took less time to reload a checkpoint than it takes to blink, and they continue exploring what it means to die in a video game in their newest title: Katana ZERO. The most important thing about repetition is how you learn, but few games properly illustrate how video game characters learn from failure. In Katana ZERO your failures are actually a plot point as the player character has the power…
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Review
April 13th, 2019 I’m not able to pin point the exact moment I fell in love with ninjas in video games, so I’ll just blame it on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (though Scorpion in Mortal Kombat was pretty cool too). Gray Fox walking down that hallway in his “first” appearance, completely untouched and effortlessly blocking bullets certainly made an impression, and subsequent playthroughs of Ninja Gaiden didn’t help dissuade my enthusiasm. Now here we are with Sekiro, a difficult game that tries to truly embrace a brutal fantasy ninja experience…albeit with a magic prosthetic arm. Liked Combat: The combat in Sekiro is similar to what you’d find in Nioh (the OTHER Dark Souls-style game set in historical Japan) where the whole point is to break down your enemy’s defenses and then hit them while they’re staggered. The key difference in Sekiro is that a hit on an enemy…
Devil May Cry 5 Review
March 18th, 2019 Eleven years ago, in an attempt to sate my hype for Ninja Gaiden II, I walked into a GameStop and pre-ordered Devil May Cry 4. A month later I was writing a scathing review that complained about poor combat flow and terrible music, but two years after that I was writing an article for the Badger Herald where I complained about Capcom ruining the Devil May Cry franchise by catering to what they thought Western audiences wanted. So what changed? Devil May Cry, as a series, is one of those franchises that gets better the more you play it, with your first playthrough of any given game acting as little more than a tutorial, with forgiving (though it may not feel like it) enemy attack patterns as you learn new skills and acquire new weapons. As you replay on harder difficulties you’ll slowly start to learn what…
Resident Evil 2 (2019) Review
February 9th, 2019 There are several large gaps in my video game experience, and one of them is the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 and never looked back, relying on spin-off titles like Umbrella Chronicles to keep me in the loop about Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3 without having to suffer through their fixed camera angles and auto aim. The remake of Resident Evil 2 (henceforth referred to as “REmake 2”) provided the perfect opportunity for me to fill in the gap of my Resident Evil knowledge, and fortunately it’s also really good. Liked “Survival”: REmake 2 is probably the closest I’ve gotten to a true survival horror experience, though I haven’t played any of those lovely indie games like Outlast. Ammo is scarce, enemies are incredibly durable, your knives break if you use them too much, and it all comes together to create a…
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Review
January 11th, 2018 Those of you that played Witcher 3 may be familiar with Gwent, the absurdly popular Witcher 3 minigame that was made into its own stand-alone video game after approximately a million people asked for it. I’ve always thought that CD Projekt Red seemed a little miffed that people wanted a “simple” card game over their graphically intensive RPGs, so the announcement of Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales didn’t surprise me that much. After all, what’s better than a free-to-play card game based on a minigame in a video game based on a book series? Obviously it’s a card game video game based on an untold story from a book series with a video game series that inspired the card game. Thronebreaker is based on a relatively unknown part of the Witcher series, specifically Queen Meve’s guerrilla activity during the second Northern War. Those who read the books will…
Spider-man Review
January 11, 2018 I’ve been in a bit of a slump when it comes to reviews, so I’m going to revert back to my old style of positives and negatives. The “too long; didn’t read” is that Spider-man is a good super hero game, probably the best Spider-man game of all time, but certain design quirks and lackluster DLC keeps it from being as good as something like Arkham Asylum or Arkham City. That being said, let’s dive in. Liked Web swinging: the web swinging is definitely great and you can do a lot with it, thanks in part to a few additional movement options that weren’t available in earlier Spider-man titles. The ability to quick turn, zip to launch points, or simply pull yourself forward to maintain speed/altitude makes the web swinging feel amazing, but it does feel a little more floaty compared to how the great web swinging…
Daredevil Season 3 Review
January 11th, 2019 This season of Daredevil is one of those amazing moments in media where you realize why previous entries in the franchise haven’t been quite up to the level you’ve been expecting. Daredevil season 1 was an excellent Netflix series that only lost steam at the very end, with great characters and action scenes that held it all together from start to finish. The rest of the Marvel Netflix shows have ranged from good to terrible, but all have been missing… something. Finally, with this newest showing of Daredevil, we have our answer about what the other series have lacked. The key is “purpose,” a feeling like the show is actually going places and doesn’t spin its wheels for several episodes because there isn’t enough story to make up thirteen hours. Daredevil season 3 has exactly that: a purpose, a driving force, and a pace that rarely feels…
Star Wars Rise of Skywalker Rant/Review
December 21st, 2019 THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. It takes a lot to land a huge, overarching storyline, particularly one that’s been going on for over a decade. Avengers Infinity War and Endgame somehow managed to pull it off and deliver an enjoyable finale, which was especially impressive when you consider that it had to also contend with a roster of over twenty characters. Unfortunately, Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker fails to meet the same standard, ignoring logic, rules of storytelling, and things that have been established before in favor of pushing out a story that they hope won’t upset as many people as Last Jedi did. So yeah, I didn’t love this movie. What follows is my traditional three part review “list” but rather than “Loved, Neutral, and Hated” like I normally do I’m instead going to do “Good Things, Problems, and Nitpicks”. Because I had a LOT…