CustomCharacter 最近的评测

Having seens bits and pieces of it over the years from following McMillen's other games, there are certain elements in Mewgenics where I completely understand why the game took so long to make...but there are many others where I question just how long the game was actually tested.

TL;DR: If you can deal with the brand of humour, I'd highly recommend it. Though I would not recommend 100%ing it in its current state unless you're very good at tactical games, e.g. Into the Breach or XCOM.

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First, I want to briefly talk about the 'strategic' layer: breeding cats. I really enjoyed this part for about...300-some hours, but after that it became a bit too much of a slog. This, though, is almost entirely my fault - I ended the game with ~250 cats in the house, with about half of them dedicated just to breeding good enough cats to do Impossible runs, but I was dedicated to having a low loss rate (I had about 5 total party kills total), so I was often pushing for low odds cats even with about as min-maxed a solution I could come up with.
There's a really smooth curve of progression of how your eugenics goes: Starting with simply getting cats with 7s in all stats to getting monsters with the best mutations + good passives + a good synergistic active. It guides players through that line of progression naturally through the focus on the three important house stats, with the other two being interesting to consider without being crucial in any way. And, with the way the maths line up, min-maxing only results in better cats faster without it being a strict requirement, even for later difficulties. You can tell that this was the main focus of development for so many years, because it's the most well-designed part of the game.

Conversely, while I enjoyed the tactical layer all the way through (barring some extreme examples), it's where the flaws of the game really show. Some flaws are slowly being patched out, but there are fundamental design problems here that are merely exasperated by the obvious examples.

Example: there are enemy types that are entirely immune to some types of effects. Flying enemies are immune to tile effects; hellish enemies are often immune to fire; and robotic enemies are immune to electricity. Classes or class archetypes that rely on these effects to do their damage are inherently hard to use due to these potential immunities, as you may not get any other damaging options on your particular run. But, hey, you might get others...right? (Not likely, due to the design of those classes.)

A more damning example: the route I consider to be easier in Act 3 has several enemies that reflect projectiles back at them. The damage you deal is often wildly disproportionate to your own HP, so this often kills your cats. So, the best option is to just...have them do nothing. There are entire classes shut down by these enemies. But, it's just one route of the last chapter, right?

Well, there's a Reflective Elite buff that does the same thing, and bosses can get it. :)

As a whole, Elite buffs are not well thought out. Most of them are middling (+2 Damage, when the best way to succeed is to win every encounter on turn 1), but there are a few that stand out to the point of basing my strategy around potentially seeing them. The mere threat of Reflective or especially Absorbent completely kills the prospect of relying on cats who use ranged attacks or high mana abilities respectively. Flaming and Static enemies create even more immunities to ruin elemental class' days even more. A build that does a ton of tiny hits dies to Spiky enemies, and kills the entire team on Reactive ones. If you're playing a build that casts a ton of low-cost spells and come across an enemy with Resonant, good luck!

Because enemies can rarely get up to five(!) of these in Impossible, these Elite buffs end up leading to is a very samey build that's simple to reproduce once you put it together: A Monk or a Fighter with Super Luck and some form of repeatable high-damage that can one-turn non-boss encounters and two-turn most bosses; some form of support via Cleric or Druid; and two carry-ons whose only purpose is to get the completion mark for their class. If you're lucky, maybe you could run one of the above builds and do damage, but you gotta keep a close eye out for those targets that will no-sell them.

Finally, the Luck stat as a whole kinda irritates me. It's too complicated for this review, but in short: Mewgenics's combat is mostly deterministic, with some effects being stochastic rolls attached to actions. One of these is critical hits. Another one is your dodge chance. This makes Luck basically the uber-stat of the game, because it impacts your damage and your survivability.

I have some other issues with the tactical layer, as well, but those are three fundamental problems I have. The other two are a bit more easily solved...

'Tragedy' Events can rarely single-handedly end a run, depending on your builds. Relying on an item for an awesome class combo? Too bad, your cat now has a parasite in that item slot. Your main damage cat gets Blood Frenzy? They've probably killed your other cats by turn 2. The equivalent 'Blessing' Events are not nearly as transformative - the best one is probably a free level up to all your cats (which is really good, sure, but not run-winning by itself). To me, the easiest fix is to have Luck effect when a cat gets a Tragedy, or at least the rarity of it. (I've gotten Blood Frenzy on too many Super Luck cats despite it being labelled as Very Rare on the wiki.) More ideally, I would have it so Tragedies can only ever be inflicted by a previous event choice. They actually do that at least once already - meeting Organ Grinder on a run offers 'itchies' (a parasite), 'wheezies' (a disease), and 'no thanks' (the next event is forced to be a Tragedy...which is often the best choice anyway because Tragedies *might* not roll those.)

Another reason why I say the game isn't as playtested as the development time would imply: effects don't always use precise terminology. Some effects say they will 'down' a cat where some will say 'kill', but they both mean the former...except sometimes, 'kill' actually means 'kill the cat'. A hilarious example is when an enemy's attack is described as "suck[ing] the soul out of its target, instantly killing it"...which just downs the cat. Another one are the terms 'unit' and 'ally': in most cases, you're not considered your own ally, sometimes you are a unit for your own abilities, sometimes neither are true. Also, some abilities do things when upgraded that aren't even implied, with Scatter Shot+ being a big example (it explicitly ignores ally squares when upgraded!) This, at least, can be fixed rather easily by simply adding more text.

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I realize I complained a lot up there, but Mewgenics is genuinely a really good game. I still feel like Isaac w/ Repentence is McMillen's best game (in part due to the Antibirth team's influence), but it's still a great experience overall. I'm sure after a decade of support, I'll be much more likely to call it McMillen's best.

That said, it certainly is someone else's magnus opus. I never really enjoyed Ridiculon's tracks for Isaac: they were atmospheric, but with the exception of Living in the Light, I much preferred Danny B's or Mudeth's tracks. That is NOT true here. The music in this game really shows off how talented Ridiculon actually is. I'm a sucker for adding lyrics to tracks at hype moments like boss fights, but even the non-tactical tracks are bangers for the genre they're in (and it's a vast repetoire of genres!) In particular, Dig Your Own Grave is an incredible send-off for the game, and their Youtube video of it doesn't do it justice because it lacks the build-up of the fight. I NEVER got tired of hearing it, even as that fight frustrated me endlessly on Impossible.

Blue Prince well and truly enthralled me for a good portion of the game...But I absolutely can't recommend it for most people.

There are, essentially, two games here. An esoteric puzzle game with tons of red herrings to sort through while also finding the tiniest of details, and a very basic deck builder roguelike.

The problem is that the former's pacing is well and truly destroyed by the roguelike mechanics. Red herrings are fine in puzzle games, or even great when done well. But in Blue Prince, if you note down a red herring in one room, you then have to not just revisit but redraw the room from your deck of 62+ cards in order to maybe find the real clues within. I can't iterate enough how absolutely infuriating it is to have to spend every reroll you have to maybe find the correct clue you need. And this is true for even the very first main puzzle of the game, but at least it's novel in those first ten hours, while you're still learning the game's fundamentals.

And it really is the deck builder portion that ruins it. That deck size mentioned above? That's before you pick up new rooms, and not including conditional rooms (like having to be in a certain wing). Late game, when you have all the added rooms, your deck is 80 cards. And that's still not including conditionals!

...And you draw three at a time, with no way to permanently remove cards.

Now, there are rules about how the cards are drawn that make it not perfectly comparable to a deck. You can't draw three dead ends; it always tries to draw at least one card that doesn't cost anything for you; if all of the drawn cards have a special resource cost, the leftmost's is waived; there are ways to manipulate how often you draw certain cards by changing their rarity; and the further back you are in the house, the less chance you have of drawing cards that have costs to begin with.

But a hand size of three is still crippling, especially since rerolls are scant. Sure, very late game, you can eventually splurg on one day of many rerolls...but that takes until about Day 60 to become possible.

The irony is that it's not even that bad a system overall, but it combined with the esoterica of the puzzle part means it may take several in-game days and real-life hours to get the combination of rooms you need to solve one puzzle - if that even is the right solution to begin with!

And it's a shame, because the dev does seem to actually understand how to develop a roguelike system - Playing on the Curse difficulty, where your resources are scant and constantly dwindling - is actually a lot of fun due to those restrictions. You're only focussed on one puzzle, so you can really focus on the room/card strategy, and the items that seemed mostly useless when playing normally suddenly become incredibly powerful. It's not perfect (you basically need to reset until you get a half-decent room upgrade), but I really enjoyed playing through the mode. (Unlike the Day One challenge...)

The game also wastes your time a lot. Every. Time. You. Pick. Up. An. Item. It. Tells. You. What. It. Does. I have picked up probably 500 shovels, game, I don't need you to pause my gameplay EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TIME. And the mods on the Nexus only alleviate this a little bit.

So, yeah. I would have a hard time recommending this game to most people. Even for those I would recommend it to, I absolutely don't recommend completing it like I did, (And I technically didn't even 100% it, because the family cipher to get into the Atelier is such an insane jump in logic to get that I would've never in a million years have put together.)

Silksong is an excellent successor to the original game in all the right ways, and largely learns from the mistakes the first game made. I respect Team Cherry for managing to make a game that feels so rewarding, even though I have criticisms. Note that this contains unmarked spoilers.

For starters: I think the first act of the game is *by far* the hardest, and it's not even close. All of my failed Steel Soul attempts ended in Act 1, and the only one that got past it was the one to beat it. And a significant part of that problem is that you just don't have enough starting health; having effectively two and a half hits before you're dead is *really* rough when you don't have the movement options or the practice that the game is designed around you having. In this vein, I'm really glad that Team Cherry reduced the environmental damage in the first patch to one mask, because that was one thing that really seemed oppressive. At least in fights, you can heal based off damage you do, but in the platforming sections? Not so much.

My second complaint is that it feels like a lot of the content feels like either filler or untested.
* Double the damage taken for a +25% bonus to Needle damage? No ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thanks, especially when Hunter Crest 3 goes up to +40% without the risk of four masks of damage.
*Silkspeed Anklets eating Silk is really rough even with three Silk Hearts, especially in platforming sections where you need the Clawline, or need to heal after botched platforming (though at least the effect is strong).
* The Beast crest having no Blue Tool slots makes it damn near unusable compared to other options (especially if you get the Hunter upgrades).
* I personally found *all* of the Crests to be inferior to the starting one after the first evolution of it (though I have seen others get good use of the Wanderer's and Architect's).
* Beyond the starting hour's three walls, Silk Skills (except for Parry) feel like gimmicks, with only a few legitimate use cases (versus just saving the silk for healing).
* Tacks feel insulting as a Red Tool when the best use of Red Tools is against fliers.
* Some tools are too niche to justify their opportunity cost: Memory Crystal, Wispfire Lantern, Pin Badge, Spider Strings, Rosary Cannon, the aforementioned Barbed Bracelet...
* Seriously, when one of the best options in the game for a Yellow Tool is a ~7.8% chance to negate a hit, you've probably got to improve that subset of tools.
* I think the second Savage Beastfly fight needs to be hard-locked behind Clawline, as that fight feels distinctly unfair and untested without it.
* Wreath of Purity should be a Yellow Tool, and should be hidden in Bilewater, as it makes the walkback to Groal much more tolerable.

My last big complaint is about accessibility. Or, rather, a couple of complaints grouped largely into "accessibility".
There are plenty of attacks that only seem to have an audio cue, not a visual one, which meant that for those enemies someone who is hard-of-hearing has to gamble on what the attack is. Seth is the boss where I really noticed this the first time, but it cropped up a few times in my later playthroughs as well.
There are areas that are just too damn dark. But brightening the screen makes some bloom effects more blinding (e.g. exiting the Ruined Chapel into Bone Bottom), so one of those effects needs to be toned down. I'd recommend the former; the Wormways and Haunted Bellhart should not be darker, IMO, than a place literally called THE ABYSS.
Even beyond potential noise sensitivities from things like autism, the human brain is highly sensitive to the sound of baby cries. As a result, I want to strangle whoever it was that made the Twisted Bud's cry hearable on every menu screen. Like, yes, good job making an incentive to get rid of it ASAP for your funni 'gotcha'; it's still unbearable. Especially since you locked an achievement behind beating Grandmother Wisp with the Cursed Crest, so you're incentivizing otherwise-clueless completionists who pick it up early (and then want to get rid of it) to keep it in the inventory as long as possible.

I want to end off with some props to Team Cherry for (as I mentioned) learning from some of the more egregious issues of the first game. Upgrading the Needle is *always* worth it (unlike in HK, where it gave some bosses more HP, to the point where spell builds were supreme for speedrunning); two-damage attacks are largely designed for except in the early game, whereas in the first game they were absolutely not (which made the Pantheon absolutely horrendous); the difficulty curve of the game is overall better (which, given my Act 1 complaints, isn't saying much, but it's better than the sheer cliff face Hollow Knight's Pantheons were.)

Overall, I had the opposite experience in Silksong that I had in Hollow Knight: In the first game, I really enjoyed myself, then suffered immensely as the endgame approached. In Silksong, the first few hours *sucked*, but as I got better at controlling Hornet I found myself enjoying it more and more. So, if you've decided to read this review hoping to understand why someone would like such a hard game, I have good news for you: it gets easier, and it gets more enjoyable.

DREDGE is pretty good. I honestly think that its biggest failing is that, despite the Lovecraftian influences and the thalassophobia it tries to instil in the player, it's a bit of a cozy game.

I wouldn't recommend *completing* it, as that gets into tedious 'sail around this island until you get the Aberration you want', and especially not if you get the Iron Rig DLC, since clearing areas takes up the item slot you would normally use to trawl for said fish.

I also wouldn't really recommend the Pale Reach DLC. It's more of the same (which is good if you want more), but it especially wants you to trawl to clear it. (Pale Grasper, my beloathed.)

Overall, I really enjoyed Metaphor. It's not perfect, but it's one of Atlus' better titles in recent years. A lot of that is due to the narrative, though; I have a lot of complaints about the mechanics of the so-called '35th anniversary game'.

On the surface, a lot of the plot in the game is very trite. "Humans are the real monsters". "Racism bad". These aren't exactly new tropes, especially in fantasy. But Metaphor doesn't pretend to have the answers, and they meld the tropes in a way that's fairly unique in my experience. It feels...genuine? I don't know if that's exactly the right word for what I mean, but it's the closest. Part of it, too, is Louis; he is probably the most compelling antagonist Atlus has written, and is probably my favourite JRPG antagonist as of writing.

But it's not just surface level. The story plays with a *lot* of tropes in neat little ways. The music you hear is diegetic, which actually becomes a minor plot point; the fluffy animal character is also the grizzled veteran; the protagonist's parents are dead *but* they still guide him post-mortem along the way (even if that's not known even to him until the end). Similarly, the protagonist's initial visage looking like a 10 year old's first fantasy OC is because...it is.. To an extent, it even uses and explains a Deus Ex Machina effectively. The player is the Deus Ex Machina..

It's not perfect, though. It's inevitably going to draw parallels to Persona, and that's not completely invalid since it ultimately still follows the Fool's Journey (although it speedruns the section from The Tower onwards). There's a part in the story that was (IMO) *very obviously* cut content. And as much as I loved it as an Etrian Odyssey fan, the fourth act's reference is brazen. Like, I got spoiled on the setting's twist *listening to the soundtrack as the game downloaded because I recognised the song.* As soon as I descended the stairs, I brought up EO1's map of the floors and found them identical. (Well, mostly.) Hell, I even bypassed most of the dungeon in the same way you can in the original (albeit more easily due to it being an ARPG dodge-roll as opposed to a tough FOE fight). I know EO is Atlus' least-recognized JRPG series, and Re:Fantazio is their anniversary game so it had to have a reference somewhere, but I can think of several better ways to do it.

As for mechanics, I'm conflicted. As I said above, I have complaints. But it's not all bad. I like Press Turn, and that's legitimately enough to make the combat fun for me. The Archetype system allows for some really neat (and potentially broken) combinations without being overbearing for those coming from easier Atlus titles like Persona.

But I do have a *lot* of complaints.

Firstly, a minor one is that a lot of the Archetypes feel like fodder for the four floating skills options you get, with no intentions on actually being used as a main Archetype. Atlus knows by now that physical weaknesses in Press Turn is a trap option, and yet they put them on several of them!

However, my main complaint is that, even though this is allegedly Atlus' 35th anniversary game, the majority of the mechanics feel like Persona 5 + Press Turn, with every character getting the Wild Card but a significantly limited pool of Personas. Like, sure, you've got...

• Megami Tensei skill names
  
• A skill system a la Digital Devil Saga
  
• A front and back row system a la Etrian Odyssey (and some older SMT titles)
  
• Archetypes that - at least superficially - reference other games.

But the problem is that all of those are relatively inconsequential.

Cool, fire spells are named 'Bot' instead of 'Agi', you made maybe fifteen people happy and made the rest of them think you randomly renamed some of them. I know I certainly did until someone informed me.

Cool, you have a class system you can change on the fly. That's never been done before in the history of JRPGs. /s

Cool, moving to the back row increases defense, and a couple Archetypes use the system. But there are *three spells* that meaningfully interact with it beyond moving everyone forward and backward, and only a single type of enemy (the chickens) care about it. The defense boost isn't substantial enough to really care, either,. (In EO, physical damage is halved *at the end of the calculation* if the target is in the back row.) And, to cap it all off, the one Archetype line that *really* uses it is one of the weakest in the game.

Oh, speaking of: I'm not kidding about some Archetypes being 'superficial' references.
Yes, the Gunner, Sniper, and Dragoon in EO all use either a gun or a bow. They're also, in order, *physical*-based elemental damage dealers, crit specialists/binders, and tanks. The Gunner line in Metaphor is none of these, albeit partly because the game doesn't have binds. At least it has ailment skills, but ailments aren't useful in Persona-style games for the player to use.
At least the Masked Dancer and Summoner use inferences to create their items (with Dancer items referencing the Major Arcana and Summoner items referencing different demon Races), and they feature cameos of sorts...but most effects aren't unique.
There also isn't really a tie to Soul Hacker's namesake beyond the name itself either AFAIK.

Finally, there's difficulty options. I solemnly swear by the idea that you should balance around your hardest difficulty, and Atlus has a...schizophrenic history of doing that. Etrian Odyssey is nearly perfect in that regard, since the highest difficulty is always the intended experience, judging by the numbers behind the scenes. Nocturne's a good example of them *not* doing that, given Hard has a reputation of killing you several times in the tutorial fight. Now, I don't know what difficulty Metaphor was balanced around (the game's pretty easy beyond the optional bosses' insta-kill nonsense), but I *do* know that I want to throttle whoever decided the MAG costs for Archetypes should be doubled on the NG+ difficulty. Regicide also leans a lot heavier into a much more boring playstyle, and it's exclusively due to the 2x multiplier on Weak and Critical hits applied exclusively to your party. Sorry, I'm not taking an Archetype I can't hide the weakness of.



Now, how would I change the game to improve it? I wouldn't necessarily do all of this, but...

- Make buffs last until dispelled a la most SMT games
- Add the three binds from EO, with the Gunner line now specialising in them. Probably also buff ailments in general for the player's benefit.
- Add more area-of-effect options that hit only a row. This would interact interestingly with Press Turn's weakness system (since you could, for example, put someone Weak in the same row as someone who Repels a type, which is an interesting trade-off if the AI always targets weaknesses)
- Bring back Smirking

TL;DR Basically Persona but with a more 'adult' narrative, like everyone thought it would be. References to other Atlus games are either superficial or audacious. Etrian Odyssey fans most affected,

When PalWorld came out, I heard people talking about other monster-collecting games and this game came up quite a bit. It happened to be on sale at the time, so I picked it up. It's a good time, overall: the elemental mechanics are generally satisfying to use (and eventually break across your knee), the music is decent (the combat tracks are a highlight, though admittedly I am a sucker for tracks that add vocals at times of hype), and the artwork is all really good. I have only a couple nitpicks about the main game:

- The comedy is really hit or miss. For me it was more misses, but there were some good moments.
- The ending kinda sucks.
- I only really found myself interested in Felix's story, and the Shakespeare references with Viola seem comically out of place.

The post-game and 100% experience, on the other hand, soured me on it a bit.

-Once you get into a potential rhythm of how everything works, you realize just how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long each combat is. Pokemon, for all its faults, has an option to turn off battle animations for a reason. I installed mods to speed up combat 5x and[i/] remove the animations, and it still felt long due to each effect (passives, ailments, etc.) having to play out individually.
-The overworld dash's ability to start a combat with a Fire element attack is sometimes detrimental. It wouldn't be as bad if you could just avoid Air-type enemies in the overworld, but because you only see one monster of a potential encounter you can bump into something hoping to beat it quickly only to have an Air Wall suddenly block you. (This is, of course, compounded by the above issue.)
-Speaking of: the Ranger board quest to knock out certain types of enemies is really rough. The whole Ranger Noticeboard system is half-baked to begin with, but given that not every enemy on the board can appear on the overworld it can become a grind of 'run into enemy -> escape because the board target isn't there -> repeat ad nauseam'.
-Several of the fast travel points are in really awful spots. One of the mods I installed fixed this by allowing me to also fast travel to campfires, but before that if I wanted to go anywhere on the north end of the map it was a frustrating endeavour of dodging weak enemies to leave, for example, the Mall or the Titania.
-The overspill mechanic is cool in the main game, where you can coordinate your fusion and attacks to end combats with other humans early, but it's a concern if you leave a low-health monster out. The post-game removes that functionality entirely from enemies, but keeps it for you, so not only does human combat become less interesting, it feels like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rules patch exclusively to screw you over.
-The post-game grind is so slow.. Seriously, you need 435 Fused Material to unlock Orb Fusions, which are the only way in the game to get more than one Fused Material at a time. Otherwise, it's static encounters and quests. Once again, this is compounded severely by how slow combat is. (This might be alleviated a bit by the Pier of the Unknown DLC, but I doubt it.)

Overall, like an 8/10. Don't 100% it unless you're a moron like me, though.

Competent Quake-style shooter. It doesn't do anything new, but it does it competently.

Sprite design is overall well-done, but I genuinely prefer the models for their readability (and I'm glad they include both options.). Levels are generally well-designed, but I think the aesthetic is a little too samey across the game, with only a few of the last levels really breaking through into their own. And I feel like quite a few of the weapons have very similar use cases or only exist until you get a better option.

I genuinely enjoyed the actual 'shipbreaking' part of this game. I liked the puzzle element of making sure you devise a plan for disassembly, then over time optimising it for time and potential mistakes. In that regard, this game is great, and mod support makes it even better.

The story though...

Look, I'm someone who's typically pro-union, and I would still describe it as idealistic union propaganda.

Lynx does everything companies used to do in the early Industrial era: company scrip rather than proper payment; renting your tools to you and only allowing you to buy them when they're beyond warranty; sending in an 'observer' whose job it is to make sure workers are hitting quota, humanity be damned; and so on. But when the ball gets rolling, they never actually do any of the historical union-busting tricks. They never send cyber-Pinkertons at you to break your kneecaps, they never hire scabs to do the work instead ( you can even be a scab and the story still turns out the same way), and in general they act rather toothless, even acquiescing to every request once the plot concludes...Which is hilarious, because Lynx would absolutely have legal recourse to fire your crew. In the game's climax, you commit an actual no-go in union protesting by destroying product. There's a reason why modern unions strike and picket rather than destroy the thing their employee does, because destruction of property is a legitimate legal reason to fire someone.

There is no way in hell the setting points a picture in which a union would actually form, which is highly incongruent with the story it actually tells.

I don't think the game was trying to make a political message, but it did, and it did it in a really poor way. I think if they committed, it could've actually been better, honestly: Kai actually dying permanently due to Hal deleting his biological backup would've been an excellent sci-fi twist to the general lesson of 'regulations are written in blood' common in blue-collar work, but they couldn't even commit to that.

TL;DR: Game content is good, story content is ♥♥♥♥. Play the Free-Play mode and don't touch Career.

I've wanted to play through the first System Shock for a while, but it's one of those games where the dated graphics and UI genuinely makes it difficult to parse in the modern era. My understanding is that this is very close to a 1-1 recreation of the game, but with a more modern UI, engine, and graphics.

Despite being a remake, it feels much like a modern Immersive Sim akin to later entries in the genre like Prey, which speaks volumes about why this is one of the fathers of the genre. I have only a few minor complaints as someone who didn't play the original:

- The cyberspace sections are all a drag. I give them mostly a pass because it looks like it replicates the original really well, but I never *liked* playing them.
- On the hardest difficulty for combat, the later enemies feel a *bit* too bullet-spongey. On difficulties 1 and 2, they feel fine.
- The ending sequence *sucks* for a number of (spoilery) reasons, and looking on Youtube it seems like it's the only major departure from the original. I understand the difficulty of translating the part of SHODAN trying to take you over, but...As soon as you step into that last cyberspace section in this, the only failstate is if you were like me and went in with little time left over; if you're not playing on the hardest difficulty, you've basically won the game at that point.

In short: they did a really good job. The complaints above are mostly nitpicks.

EDIT: Since the most recent update said to change the ending, I replayed it. It's much better, still not perfect but at least it's actually kinda fun this time.

🖕 ♥♥♥♥ you Microsoft, Tango gives you one of the best games of 2023 and you reward them by shutting them down? Un-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-believable.

My review from when I 100%'d the game is still below. While it's a lot of complaining about minutiae, I still ultimately really enjoyed this game. I am not happy with Microsoft's actions.

I loved this game. The gameplay is solid, it takes itself *just* seriously enough that the emotional moment at the end still works, and most of the music is fantastic (even if the Streamer Mode variants sometimes feel like Legally Distinct versions of the licensed tracks). The recently-added gamemodes are difficult but designed largely for people who've otherwise mastered the game, so they feel really good to play once you're at that point. Overall, 8/10 experience.


However, the 100% journey is...not great, and I'd like to complain a bit.

First off: Why do I have to beat the game on *every difficulty?* That's a minimum of 5 times, but more realistically 6 times since you probably won't get all S ranks on your first playthrough, and each runthrough where you miss a secret thing adds *another.* The difficulty settings are also kinda wack; once you get used to the gimmick, Rhythm Master is probably the *easiest* difficulty because enemies don't die as easily, meaning you can continue to combo them for much longer than lower difficulties. The only time I ever reached a 200 hit combo was on RM, and it wasn't even close otherwise. I had to spam a cheese strategy to get my S scores on the easiest difficulty because enemies died too quickly for me to get enough points off them.

That cheese strategy? Hibiki. It's the dominant strategy of the game. Why should I bother using my entire moveset that I've practiced if I can just spam Steal Counters or Shred until I get enough batteries to spam Hibiki for a minimum of 7000 points per enemy hit? Once I learned about it, I was frustrated because it was so much easier and faster than actually comboing through most enemies.

WA-ES-2 enemies - the samurai ones - waste so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time because they're the only enemies that can enter the Rhythm Parry Attack armour stance without actually doing the attack, and will sometimes enter a brief cutscene when doing it anyway (usually ending your combo.) Yes, I know you can use Korsica to blow them out of the armour stance, but it still wastes so much time compared to every other enemy in the game. Especially since their actual Rhythm Parry Attack still has a significant wait time until the timing comes out because of the poem it writes that only Japanese readers can understand!

Fire-related anything kinda sucks, mostly because you have to wiggle the sticks to put it out. I got an RSI playing Metal Gear Rising because of wiggle-the-sticks attacks, so I'm never a fan of them. But also, fire-based enemies are more difficult to parry because fire often lingers beyond the parry invuln beats. Unless you have the chip that buffs the length of invuln from directional parries, a GNR-FL0 will still set you on fire if it's shooting you at the same time as something else.

The rhythm sections are fun the first couple times, but since they *never change* it stops being interesting. Mimosa's is particularly egregious in that regard, because you have to fight her in two separate Rhythm Tower climbs. The emotional moment with the Reflection track is fantastic the first time and a great story moment...but it's two and a half minutes of slow rhythm gameplay in a game about fast-paced action gameplay, and you're asking me to play through it at least four more times, long after the emotional catharsis of the scene means anything.

Finally, while I like the majority of music in this game, the Korsica arc feels like it goes for waaay too long, and I think it's largely because the two larger levels' songs - Security Shutdown and This'll Be Rough - sound really similar when outside of combat. Contrast the previous arc, which has four songs over two shorter levels - one is a remix, sure, but it's a much higher BPM and it's for a single section of the level.

Overall, I highly recommend this game, and I *do* actually recommend a second playthrough on Rhythm Master if you got the hang of the systems in your first playthrough. Just...don't go for 100%.