Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Steam): A quiet, hidden forest treasure

Oh the steam summer sale. That magical time of the year where you spend money you probably shouldn't on games that you will never get around to playing. I've done it, you've done it. 90% of the time when I buy one game I was really looking forward to and about 10 that I never even touch. But every so often I stumble across one that seemed like it could be interesting if given the shot.

I've never heard of this series, but this is the 4th in the franchise. It also happens to be a prequel so despite it being the newest I get to start its story from the beginning. Would this be just another title that was purchased and then immediately forgotten to the pile of shame? Or would I stumble upon a gem to be treasured and valued? Let's find out.

MOMODORA: REVERIE UNDER THE MOONLIGHT: (Steam)

The tale of Momodora starts 400 years before the events of the first game, where a young priestess named Kaho travels to the eastern kingdom of Karst to investigate a spreading curse that is threatening her lands and village. Upon reaching the outskirts of Karst city she is confronted by a Knightess called Cath.

Cath informs Kaho that the source of the curse is coming from the Queen of Karst, but she has locked herself away in the castle. Cath advises Kaho to leave while she handles it, but the curse affects Kaho as well. They can't enter without finding crest pieces necessary to enter the castle so armed with only a bow and a maple leaf (the signature weapon of these priestesses), Kaho explores to find the crests to confront the queen and curse.

Uh, Nice to meet you too, Cath.

Wow. Very few games have such a cut and dry story these days. I actually had to fluff some of it up to get two paragraphs of description. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is a classic styled 2d Castlevania style game the borrows some mechanics from the Dark Souls franchise, done in the retro style pixel graphics that oh so often make me weak in the knees from the onset. 

Let's start with that, actually. From what I have seen in previous games, Momodora titles were typically done with small sprites that allowed for minimal animation detail (think Super Meat Boy). This iteration however the sprites are significantly larger, which allows them to have much more significant detail in their sprite animation. It clearly shows because all of the action animations have been beautifully detailed with multiple frames and poses to give it a very natural and fluid feel.

The dodge roll looks natural, the attack swings have a sense of weight that give a very realistic timing that just feels right. Characters and bosses have lots of signature motions to telegraph attacks which is incredibly crucial for this style of combat engine, and they appear to do a lot with a very minimal color pallet. Monsters and characters are all very differently and interestingly designed.

Bells function as checkpoints. Like Dark Souls bonfires they restore health,
refresh your items, and give you a checkpoint in the case of death.

Environments look like they belong right at home on the NES or SNES consoles, and while there is only so much detail you can give to castle corridors and caves, the environments make great use of parallax hiding details of the background environment in layers, making cityscape and forests look so much more impressive because it allows them add subtle details that fade with each layer of distance. I'm a huge fan of pixel art and good sprite work so this kinda stuff really appeals to me.

The map is long and sprawling much like you would expect of a Metroidvania game with locked doors, paths that require specific abilities to get through, and looping paths to provide short cuts back to other areas of the game. The game is not massive in its size but it is modestly sizable so it's certainly not a game you are going to blow through in one or two hours. I would say there are about 8 or 9 different areas that you'll need 4 keys to fully unlock.

Combat at its core uses very simple mechanics. I hate to constantly use the credit of Dark Souls because it's not the first to use the invincibility frames but much of Salt and Sanctuary's 2d styled combat rings familiar here. Kaho's running speed if I am being generous is moderately paced, so you will probably be using the dodge role to pick up the pace. When fighting you will spend the majority of your time with simple button mashing combos to swing your leaf, and then using your dodge roll to roll through or away from enemy attacks. If the situation demands you are also able to rapid fire your bow for weaker but safer ranged attacks.

Battle is augmented by the items that you can collect that give you various stat boosts and abilities. Some of them provide immediate effects like attack buffs, but a large majority of them have passive abilities such as lifesteal, status aliment resistances, magnetism for items and so on. You can only equip two and their affects could be for battle or for exploration and they can be restored at checkpoints which is nice. But, you will only get so many uses between them so you need to choose wisely based on your play style as well as alternate based on need.

The music of this game is generally chill, and kinda dark. The opening theme when starting in the forest opens with a very slow paced and somber tune. After that when going from castle outskirts, to cathedral, to caves and so forth the music sticks to more of an ambient droning rather than actual music, but when it does it tends to stick to pretty melancholy melodies.

Even the music when fighting a boss monster tends to stick to a relatively deep noted loop or an uptempo melody. I like the music in this game but I wouldn't say that it's catchy in any capacity. It's perfectly acceptable for the tension level of these moments, but I wouldn't say that the music is the strength of this game. It's totally serviceable but nothing to write home about.

Even when monsters are not violent, they are not friendly.

It isn't a very long game, either. Depending on your level of determination and frustration to boss fights, the entire game can be ripped through with bad and good endings inside of a couple of sittings. I think I managed to play through its entirety in a few days. Maybe spanning that 7-12 hour range. There is a new game plus where you can start with the equipment you collected, but it doesn't really change the game much.

There are also a number of difficulty settings, but I feel that normal really does provide the best experience. It provides just enough challenge that the game is not a pushover and will punish you for making stupid mistake or rushing too carelessly, but fair that you can learn patterns and make easy work of bosses so long as you pay attention and learn. I tried to start streaming this game on Hard and even knowing where things were or what patterns enemies had it was still punishing me to the point where I was struggling to make it to the first boss with increased enemies and reduced health.

And this is a minor nitpick at best, but I found the jump to be needlessly frustrating. Kaho has a relatively low jump height, but she does have a double jump. I supposed that would sort of lend to realism if it was reduced to a single jump, but with a double jump it feels like it should be much higher than it is. I don't know. I don't think it really affected battles as much as I felt they did. Again, minor nitpick.

I suppose my biggest complaint about Momodora is that its weakest aspect is probably its story. You are given a minor back story, and primary goal, but the game doesn't really seem to evolve past that point. Cath is the only major NPC that gives some meaty exposition and she doesn't feel like she in the game enough to really flesh out the story.

There are a couple of NPCs that you can speak to, but at best they give some minor explanation about an upcoming boss. After beating the game both bad and good endings, I didn't feel like I had much in the the way of resolution, and didn't have that strong connection to the universe it presented me with because it felt like it never really explored it, which is a real shame. Perhaps I will get more if I play the other titles, but for my first entry to the series I was left wanting more.

But despite those flaws I ended up greatly enjoying Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and am very glad that I took a chance on it. That's really the one thing I can put trust into with steam reviews. If they say it's getting overwhelmingly positive reviews, I can generally trust that. This game feels like it would be right at home on the NES, but will polished modern controls. You can find it on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for as low as 10 bucks, and it also goes on sale so I would say check it out. Good games like this deserve to be played.

Oh yeah, and you can turn into a cat.

Valkyria Revolution (PS4): Oh Valkyria... What has Sega done to you...

So a little over 5 years ago (Jesus Christ) I had written a review for a game I thought was great that almost nobody played. It was a bizarre blending of anime, JRPG, tactical RPG, 3rd person shooter, and first person shooter. All these mechanics should have made it some ridiculous mish-mash, but somehow it worked. I really enjoyed it a lot, and felt since nobody bought I would heap some credit on it. That game was Valkyria Chronicles. 

Apparently there must have been some demand for it, because after the release of the PS4 Sega decided to give it a purdy HD sheen and re-release it with all the DLC on PS4. And I bought it again, because I'm a sucker. There was also apparently demand for the two following sequels released previously on the PSP. So someone at Sega figured why the hell not, lets toss out a new Valkyria game and see how it does? I couldn't wait, and bought it without hesitation.

VALKYRIA: REVOLUTION(PS4)

The story of Valkyria: Revolution takes well into the future of the first game. It begins with a man and his teach discussing a private grave honoring the 5 traitors of the nation of Jutland, and why history doesn't explain why they were honored so. Richelle is teacher to the Jutland royalty and knows the true story, and sits to tell him the true story of the Jutland Liberation.

The continent of Europa is still a country of nations, and ragnite is still the resource that rules the world now not only for its potential as a power source, but now for the alchemic properties that allowed so many nations to enter an advanced industrial age. The Ruzi empire has the biggest slice of the pie, and has advanced and expanded its influence to maintain its military power and ragnite control over Europa. During its expansion, the emperor Klaudiazs and his five generals set flame to a stand alone orphanage and took hostage to its caretaker, a woman named Maria.

She basically put up zero defiance, so I don't know why Ruz had the raze the orphanage.

Five of the orphans that survived formed a tight knit circle and after their adoption advanced themselves with skills to take revenge with the nation of Jutland. Amleth, rose as a soldier to captain an elite squad. Violette uses her femme fatale charms as a spy, Basil uses his economic influence and power to equip the military, Fritte uses his skills as a columnist to stir the will of the populous, and Solomon uses legislature to advance political action of the nation. The five of them decide to use the nation of Jutland to push to war with the Ruzi empire to kill the Emperor and his 5 generals and learn of Miss Maria's fate under the guise of Jutland liberating the empires captured nations.

But all is not so easy as the Princess of Jutland herself, Opheila, joins the military to fight along side her people on the front lines, stationed in the unit under Amelth's command. The 5 now have to advance carefully to pursue their revenge and manipulate the war, without their intentions being discovered by Opheila, who wants truly nothing more than the liberation of Jutland and the surrounding nations.

Violette, Basil, Amleth, Solomon, and Fritte: the Traitors of Jutland.

Did that seem wordy? Because it was. I know Valkyria games really heavily lean on cutscenes to get their stories across since the levels aren't really long enough to effectively weave the narrative into the gameplay, but this one is in a severe, SEVERE need of an editor. First off it's trying to tell this complicated tale of two nations militaries at war, then it's trying to explain the subterfuge of the 6 major characters trying to control it from the shadows, (only one of which is playable).

But then it also deals with the interpersonal relationships with the squad, and the princess. The squad has like close to 15 playable characters, and it's like they all try to cram a line or two of dialog into every cutscene like a bad impov session. When this happens scenes that should have been over like 20 minutes ago will drag on and on because every character has to drop some trite one line platitude that does nothing to contribute to the story or develop their character. The squad is literally a pick and mix of anime tropes and most of them aren't even good. Some of them are literally the same as the character they share the scene with.

It's made especially bad by some phenomenally bad voice acting. This to me is the more amazing thing because since I play a lot of games, I recognize a lot of voices. Some of these actors are incredibly talented. I've heard them in better works. Hell eff'n Matt Mercer who does amazing voice work is in it and while he's one of the better acted characters in this game, overall the voice acting makes cutscenes that drag on far to long feel even longer. I've had some story segments run over 40 minutes before I actually got to a level (and when you are streaming this does not keep people watching, let me tell you).

Toooooo many eff'n characters.

They changed the battle system for Valkyria: Revolution and I honestly have no idea why. Valkyria as I know is more or less a tactical RPG. Think kind of like in Phantom Brave terms: You bring out your set peices to the battle. They have their own moves and ranges and abilities. You move your pieces for attacks (while getting shot at as you) and then once you've made you moves, the enemies get their crack with you shooting at them. It was a weird amalgamation of game elements but they actually managed to work well together.

Valkyria: Revolution has completely done away with the tactical element of the game, and when the fans rebelled in the first trailer videos they tried to adjust the abilities to give it a more tactical feel. Essentially how the missions work is you select 4 troops from your Vanargand squad between your Shocktrooper heavies, fast and nimble Scouts, your Sapper mages, and your Shield-bearer tanks. Typically you will take Amleth and Princess Ophelia for your shock and scout, since 90% of the time they are required for the story anyways. You basically round out the party with whatever characters or roles you want left.

Once the mission starts you usually have a relatively simple objective: Hold this point, take this base, beat this boss. As soon as the missions starts you basically have free reign to wander the map and take out enemies. You have an attack button, guard, dash, menu and lock on. It's not turn based anymore but the action does freeze when you go into the menu if you want to fire a shot with one of your guns, use a grenade, or abilities. This is part of the concession to try to make it a little more tactics based (because upon first seeing the game play fans complained) but it doesn't really hold up that well.

The point of giving use of the guns or terrain is what allowed the tactical combat system to work. You could run to cover, take your shot, then have protection when it wasn't your turn. Now I find that there is little reason to use it as I can just vault the cover and swing my sword around since there is no turn order anymore. The only time you really want to use a grenade or ability is when you have a bunch of enemies grouped or have a particularly stubborn foe like one of the mech tanks.

When you complete missions you get spoils of money and abilities to equip to your characters. These abilities have affinity levels so on top of leveling your character, you basically have to bank in your unused abilities to move around a skill grid to allow you to use greater abilities, as well as build up characters individual abilities on top of their base stats. The problem is you have squad of like 15 people, the grids expand, and you don't get a lot of spoils from fights as you play through the game. So you for sure can expect to be doing a bit of grinding to try to get your mainstays up to level. I think even just focusing on 2 characters, I never seemed to have enough.

In between story missions you can also take on a number of free missions as well. There is no story tied to any of these so they are basically a free sortie to get spoils and levels. But what this also does is affect the map during the course of the war, so there will be hot-zones where you are pushing or getting pushed back. The more area you take during the free battles, the more the trade embargo will be lifted and more items you can purchase during when you are back at your home base.

Skill upgrading in this game is the fucking bane of my existence.

Much like the previous game, in the home base you can go to your R&D department to improve your guns, grenades, and launchers as well as boost your characters grids. There are also a number of shops where you can buy supplies and you can take them to a main outfitter where you can rework your gear for the team as a whole with bonus effects. I will be 100% honest I did this maybe once or twice at best because the upgrades seemed marginal at best and you have to wait a battle to pick up the item you crafted AND you can only do them one at a time. Sorry Valkyria: Revolution but I got shit to do. For the most part this didn't seem to impede my progress.

So usually when I review a game I go into the basic mechanics then go into what and I liked and what I didn't but as you can already tell from this one, there is a lot of shit that I didn't like. So let's keep that ball rolling. Now I've mentioned that that every single cutscene is much too long and relatively poorly acted, filled with trite and pointless lines.

But it also suffers from the problem of the first game of forcing you to go back to the main menu of the two characters in the future discussing the events at the end of every single chapter. There is no reason to do this. I can't go back and play old missions until the beat the game, and I honestly don't want to see the extra cutscenes. All you are doing is adding a step in getting me through the trudging story and makes it that much harder for me to get the action.

There is no reason to keep bringing me back here. Let me jump to the main menu
from the pause menu when I want to go. Keep the story going.

What the hell happened to graphics in this game? Both of them are anime looking yes, but the original had this beautiful watercolor washed out style that made it a joy to look at with bright colors that looked rustic, and classic anime design with soft fluid animations that made it look like I was actually watching old footage. Valkyria Revolution swapped that out for this almost generic video-gamey looking anime archetype. While all the characters are well designed that they all manage to stand apart from each other, something about the eyes just makes them all look too similar to one another.

The animation in combat is fine, but it does the old Resident Evil animation of hand conversations during talky portions of the game, which are silly in their own right. But when a single character has like a 10 minute monologue, that never cuts to a different camera angle, you have a single jackass waving his left arm at about should height in the same circular animation for the entirety of it. It's impossible not to notice and looks even dumber when you do.

The music isn't all that spectacular though either. The majority of it is tolerable, well fitting for the menus or scenes you are in. But two songs are played almost ad nauseam throughout the whole game. One is the song that plays when the villains are talking, which sounds so relentlessly sinister they could be talking about giving away puppies to new forever homes and you'd think it's the most evil thing of the world. The title track of the game is the other one, which plays almost every battle and in many cutscenes. It does have a good melody and does give the battle a feeling of epic so in that regard it is well placed, but it's a pretty paltry offering overall.

The grind is insufferable in this game. Things started off hot with me getting a quick level advantage over the enemy that carried me through the meat of the game, but in the later stages where you have boss fights with one of the Valkyria they become these painful battles of attrition because of these bullshit defense stacking abilities that bring your party's damage to next to zero. Even your shock troopers who usually can mow through everything will barely dent through, making these fights take forever.

And as stated above the rewards for doing this are negligible at best. After a few missions I only would get enough reward to move Amelth a few spaces on his grid, because if you want good experience you have to burnt he better skills you get. But those are the ones I want to equip! Thankfully the game continued to dump a number of abilities I never ever bothered to use which helped a little, but again the tedium of the process would just kill any motivation I had to grind.

There is no way to sugar coat it. This combat system is fucking boring. It's not fast paced enough to truly feel like an action game. The animation has no weight behind it so all the strikes glide through as if there was no impact. It's too free form to have any sense of RPG structure too it. Like I said using the skills and guns feel like a token attempt to go "hey see? this is still kind of a tactics game right?"  On top of that a significant portion of the missions just take too long, even when they don't. There have been times where I have playing missions that feel like I have been going for well over an hour only learn I played about 12 minutes.

The game also feels just too easy. Like I said its got a pretty convoluted skill and upgrade system, and it can't be that effectual if I was able to basically not use the shops in any capacity, only grinding up a few characters and was pretty much able to cruise through a significant portion of the game. It has about 10 episodes and a finale,  and aside from a few trip ups on a few boss fights I sailed to chapter 10 with relative ease.

No connection Slyvia Bles, who actually was a deep, conflicted, and interesting character.
By having it jump so far down the timeline this is really the only connection to Valkyria Chronicles.

But this game makes one fucking cardinal sin that made me put the game down. Near the end of the game in one of the final missions, it pulls the bullshit "we need to split up" deal and forces you to control two teams. I think this happens only one other time in the game, and the problem is if you played the game like I had done, you would get the mission with two stud main characters, two acceptable supports, and a whole load of fucking trash because I don't have the 90 hours I would need to level up these stupid characters to equip stronger abilities.

So now I'm stuck. Either I break up my good team and struggle to get through it, or I go in with a team of scrubs and hope for the best. Either way it killed the pace of the game and motivated me to move to something else. Sorry Valkyria Revolution, but I'm a working adult with shit to do.

And the real tragedy of it is, despite some incredibly dumb parts and even dumber dialog, the story was starting to get me a little bit. While the most of it is just useless fluff that I didn't care about, I was interested to see how the situation with the traitors and the princess were going to play out. Looks like I won't be doing that myself, because this game shot its one saving grace in the foot. Its single shred of interesting narrative.

I did end up growing to like Ophelia in her naivete. She's for her country first,
but she is surprisingly receptive and understanding to all sides of the conflict.

Honestly I don't know why this surprises me. Sega has a long track record of not knowing what the fuck they are doing. The only reason they are sort of succeeding is because they purchased Atlus and them left them alone. They haven't messed up my beloved Yakuza or Persona franchises yet, but other than that if they're not pimping out Sanik's used asshole, it's ruining a franchise people used to love. Valkyria is no exception.

I stomached as much of this game as I could. Hoping it would get better. I really wanted it to. Sometimes you can push through bad voice acting and find a hidden gem of a good game (Star Ocean: Last Hope and Infinite Undiscovery are great examples). But there are just too many horrible errors to overlook on this one. The game was universally panned by other reviews, and I have no other choice but to pile on: Valkyria Revolution sucks. Buyer beware.

Ugh, I didn't even get into the English singing in this game.
Dreadful.

Attack on Titan (PS4): Simple but Effective.

I wasn't too late to the party when this anime started making some waves. I made the foolish mistake of watching the first episode of it right before bed, so that wasn't a smart move. But like so many people I loved the series and have been ravenously destroying the mangas as they have been released. I am very clearly a fan.

I had kept my eye on this one since its release last year. I saw a number of youtuber's stream their own let's plays of it throughout the year and it seemed fairly simple in its concept and really needed to execute on two major fronts. I had it on my xmas list this year but didn't get it, but I did have a good amount of Amazon credit after the holidays, so with a little extra spending money to burn I got myself a copy of....

ATTACK ON TITAN:(PS4)

The campaign mode of this game is generally condensed telling of season one of Attack on Titan but for those of you who do not know: over a century prior to the start of our story, humanity was attack by this species of gigantic humanoid monsters called Titans. They devoured humans on site maliciously and without mercy. Humanity was pushed near the edge of extinction forcing the remaining populous into a city protected by 3 massive walls, With royalty and the wealthy class in the center, and the poorer and downtrodden in the outer ring. For over 100 years, these walls protected humanity.

We take the perspective of Eren Yeager, his adoptive sister Mikasa Ackerman, and their friend Armin Arlert. Eren has a long standing desire to see the world beyond the walls, and quickly gets his wish as a massive 100 meter Titan looms over the walls and smashes through it, allowing smaller titans to invade the city. Thousands of lives are lost, and Eren loses his mother as she is eaten by a titan. Eren swears vengeance to kill all titans and joins the ranks of the military, with Mikasa and Armin in tow.

Five years pass and they work their way to cadets before deciding what sect of the military they are going to station to, with working omni-directional gear that is used to combat titans when the walls are attacked again by the colossal titan. With another opportunity to fight, Eren submits to his bloodlust and takes the fight to the titans.

Armin, Eren, and Mikasa

Now this is somewhat of a simplified summary of the basic events that get the game in motion, but I glossed over quite a bit. The game, in all honesty, kind of does as well as the cut-scenes between missions give us rather brief expositions of the story to transition us to the scenes that take us to the next mission. It's not a bad telling and if you have never seen Attack on Titan it will at least keep you up to speed, but if you are looking for the plot line, you really should watch the show.

Thankfully in my case, I didn't give a shit about the story development because I have seen it before. What I needed from this game was to be successful at two things and only two things. One: is it fun and fluid to fly around the city using the omni directional gear? And Two: is to fun to use said ability to fly around to kill big dumb derpy Titans? If this game succeeded on these two points, I would consider this a worthwhile purchase.

So lets start with moving around. There is a standard run and jump which you will use pretty much never. For some areas like open fields you can ride horseback, but 90% of the game will involve you using the Omni-direction mobility gear (or vertical maneuvering equipment, whatever). It works fairly simply enough, you tap the square/X to fire off an anchor for your gear, It doesn't need to aim so long as you are in high terrain, and it will immediately yank you up into the air. As long as have a visible anchor symbol, you can continue to press the anchor button and you will swing continually as long as the environment allows.

I should stress holding it is all you need to do, I was trying to time my presses and it was slowing me down. You can also use the jump button to fire a burst of gas from your tanks to increase you speed or keep you airborne if you are trying to jump a wide gap or something. For the most part it works pretty easily, and the only real problem comes in sometimes when you smack into the side of a building. It doesn't work exceptionally great for going straight up in the air.

Flying around the map is a joy to do. 

When approaching Titans to fight you will be able to switch from mobility mode to combat mode. Its more or less a lock on, and when you lock in on a target you are able to fire off anchors into them. This allows you to swing around your target, and more importantly allow you to get above them. Titans will usually have 5 targets on their knees, elbows, and nap of the neck. As we know, you can only KILL a titan by attacking the neck, but occasionally there material drops in the arms and legs, so its wise to try to farm that when you have the chance.

Battle is somewhat straightforward as well. Once you are anchored onto your target, you can flip between the targets and re-anchor at will. As long as you are moving the analogs you will continue to shift your position and it will let you know about how far away from the titan you are. If you let go of the analog your ODG will start to reel your in towards the titan. Upon getting in range you can tag the triangle/Y to make an attack. You need to speed to really deal damage so you want to start from far enough away that you can build speed before the strike. Otherwise you'll need to use a burst of gas or you'll fudge the attack.

Flying with the anchors in combat can be finicky when doing it in close quarters or when fighting multiple titans. A titan will never trip up themselves or you on an anchor attacked to them, but if you swing and cross through a tree, building, or another titan the line will snap and you'll need to re-anchor. And these pricks will trip up your line and try to grab you a lot, so be ready for it.

Every single kill you make in the game is immensely satisfying.

Generally, when going through the game either in the story mode or online mode, you will enter a location with a main objective. You could dash right to the objective and take it down, but you will usually get a pretty shitty ranking for that. While traveling the map you will that other characters will be on the map and they may be in trouble. There are various side objectives that these characters are doing (like killing titans, defending a point, escorting someone to saftey) and you can go to help them to keep them alive. If you do, chances are you will gain better materials and they will assist you in the fights for the rest of the level.

Yes, you aren't fighting alone. There are a number of varied survey corps members around as well as main characters. Each of these have a rank of effectiveness so naturally you'll want to help your teammates to get better support. For characters like Armin and Hange, who have the ability to control their teammates attacks, its almost crucial because it basically gives you a series of homing shots. 

Characters have abilities that develop as you level them. I mentioned strategists like Armin and Hange who have abilities that keep them safer in battle from a distance, but then you have heavies like Mikasa or Levi who can pretty much yo-yo themselves for multiple attacks, which allows them to bring down titans faster than other characters, There are also characters who are better at resource collecting. The story mode lets you run through a majority of these characters so you can get a feel for who you like when you go into online mode.

As you might have guessed, Levi is the most busted character in the game.

And for those who watched the show or read the manga before hand? Yes you will have segments where using a titan will be in play. But I'll be 100% honest with you? This is probably the most boring aspect of the game. You can run at speeds and slug it out and throw other titans, but it just feels like it turns into a regular brawler. A regular old brawler is not why I am here.

Lastly, as I've mentioned there is materials you get during missions. This is what allows you to upgrade your ODG or swords. There isn't a whole world of difference between the main types of gear. For swords do you want range, power, or capacity/durability. For ODG do you want speed, Range, strength, and capacity. Honestly, I found it best to just keep upgrading the standard gear because they were the most balanced, but if you dabble further into the online scout mode, you'll need to tailor your gear for harder missions.

In online, multiple players can use the same character.
So if you wanted 4 titans to play the game in boring mode, you could.

It should also be noted that your gear isn't indefinite. There is degradation to your primary equipment, namely the amount of swords you have to use, how long they last, and how much pressure you have to air dash around. There are scouts littered across the map that you can stop at for a quick re-supply, but with the right equipment I've found that this rarely is an issue. You also have the ability to trigger a decisive battle which will give you increased attack, and small boost to your gear.

The Scout Mode is more or less the online version of the game. You can continue to play increasingly challenging missions for more supplies and experience as well as a mod where you can scout multiple missions in a row. Whats nice about this is you have the freedom to choose what character of the majority of the cast you'd like to use. So when I played online, it was a lot of Eren's, Mikasa's, and Levi's. I was constantly hunting for materials so I often used Christa, which seemed to annoy most of the groups I played with because she is probably the weakest character in the game.

A weird thing about the online mode of the game is I was under the assumption that the party/room leader was who got to selection missions. I had this one asshole invade one of my games, My room was set that I was clearly focusing on missions at this level of difficulty, and after doing one of them this prick would go into the mission NPC, change my mission to a different mode entirely and then ready immediately, thus locking the mission in place and not allowing it to be changed. It was fucking annoying and I had to kick him because it was my room.

Because you are a chump, Armin. Grow a pair and fight like everyone else is.

I find the soundtrack to this game to be simultaneously great and generic at the same time. This is something the Tales Of series tends to struggle with. They managed to produce this epic sounding score that feels great when you are battling titans or flying around, but if you asked me to hum a few notes of my favorites, I couldn't do it because its all utterly forgettable. I honestly don't know how this is possible but its surprisingly common it feels like.

Graphically I guess you could say its got kind of a washed out cell shading to it? I don't know how to describe it but its something about the grittiness of how the characters are animated makes them contrast sharply to the backdrop and environment around them it works to make the characters pop in their otherwise grimy surroundings.

Using your decisive flare can get you out of pinch or give that last push on a hard titan 

The game honestly could have tooled with the upgrade and progression system somewhat. It feels like hunting for supplies is always a chore and if you are playing online good luck trying to get people to help you do it. You have to clear as many as you can as fast as you can to really get A and S ranks on your missions and most people just dash to the finish and kill the boss. You'll get C's for that. It causes you to miss out on a lot of bonus supplies for equipment that honestly is only marginally better than what you are using. Expect to be checking back a lot.

And one can argue that the game is incredibly repetitive. The real meat and potatoes of the game will be you flying around on the ODG in massive open environments around swarms of titans. The only things that break the pace are the few missions where you actually get to control a titan, but as I've said earlier, doing so takes away from what I feel is the fun part of the game. So yeah, not a whole lot of real variance to the game from the start to the finish. The biggest challenge really is learning its somewhat awkward controls. Even once you beat the story, the online missions are basically variants of story missions with slightly changing difficulty.

Not unless you are playing with friends, Hange.

But you know what? I played this game for HOURS. Went completely through the story mode, hopped online and did a bunch of missions with some random strangers, and I almost never got tired of flying around and hacking away at titans. The increasing difficulty of the missions some how did just enough to really keep me engaged with this game for a lot longer than it should of. Leveled up a bunch of characters and pretty much kept playing it till something new came out.

So I consider this worth the purchase I paid for it. It goes on sale often and will probably be looking a price drop sooner than later, so for what its worth I enjoyed Attack on Titan. While it might not be the most developed and fleshed out game to ever come out, I said at the onset that it had to do two things right and on that front it most certainly succeeds. If you are a fan of the series Attack on Titan will provide you with a fun experience, just don't expect to probably come back to it after you've moved on to something else.

I seriously don't get why the show is deviating from the manga for season 2.
That story is so friggen good.

Final Fantasy XV(PS4): An enjoyable Bro'd trip.

Sighs.... OK Final Fantasy. We've been doing this dance for what feels like 20 something years at this point. You've been my favorite series once, it's been well established that I feel you were at your best with six and ten, and you certainly didn't do yourself any favors continually cramming Lightning down my throat. It took you 3 tries to get that right. So now I read that the whole company is putting everything into making this installment a success, everything I saw at first did not lead me positively. Four dudes driving around a car in what seems to be just a Final Fantasy version of the midwest? Eh....

But then something kinda clicked while I was fiddling with one of the two demos that got released. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to see a JRPG that kept the kinda of fantasy monsters and themes, but kept it in a contemporary setting. Well, this is as close to that as I've gotten so far that I can remember, so with renewed energy I sat down with....

FINAL FANTASY XV(PS4)

(played in 2016)

So I won't lie, Final Fantasy XV's story is a bit of a muddled mess. SquareEnix seems to be determined to make their story as confusing as possible. So much so that it is actually recommended to watch the Final Fantasy XV movie Kingsglaive prior to the playing the game. It gives a little more context to what it happening in the world of this game, but ultimately you will want to keep to some basic points to help move you along.

You play as Noctis, the heir to the throne of Lucis, a small kingdom in the world of Eos. Lucis is bustling empire which contains a magical artifact known as the Crystal, a gift bestowed by the deities of this world, and is controlled via a ring passed down through the royal family. Lucis has been at a constant war with the neighboring technological and militaristic empire of Niflheim which controls most of Eos, but they have called a armistice with the condition that Noctis marries his childhood friend and destined oracle Lunafreya.

However, as Noct and his crew travel to Accordo to reunite with Lunafreya for the wedding, it is shown (or known if you watched Kingsglave) that this was just the set up for a double cross. Lucis is attacked, the city is heavily damaged, Noct's father is killed, the crystal is stolen, and he and Lunafreya are presumed dead. With no other course of action other than the press on as the current last of the line of Lucis bloodline, Noct sets out to find Lunafreya, retrieve the weapons of the Ancient Lucian Kings and inherit the powers of the Lucian line, and retrieve the crystal back from the empire.

Ok, Prince goes to get revenge, take what is stolen, and get the girl. That's where our head needs to be because even for a Final Fantasy game they managed to weave an incredibly confusing plot. I will say that watching Kingsglaive helped with that, but there is really little reason that couldn't have just been in the game instead of as a stand alone movie. Perhaps because the film doesn't really even contain Noctis and therefore might be considered vestigial, but perhaps if you controlled Lunafreya in these segments it would have made more sense and fleshed the story about better. The demos could have probably been crammed in here too.

So while Final Fantasy has gone through a number of different iterations, but at its core it has always been a JRPG or a variant of it. Well, after numerous attempts to squash the JRPG out of the the game, Final Fantasy XV succeeds by more or less completely removing the menu based elements out of the game. Now we have almost and Auto-fight version action based of Kingdom Hearts, its designed to be both simple, skillful, and seamless all at once, and I'll be damned if it doesn't actually work pretty well.

There is no combat transitions like the Final Fantasy of old. As you wander near enemies and they become hostile the weapons pop out and you are immediately in the fray. Combat is primarily controlled by a number of button holds. If you hold your standard attack, Noctis will continue to wail on the baddie you are trained on for as long as you MP holds up, chipping a little away with each attack. If you use your Warp, you can fling your weapon for a heavier teleport strike as well as use this to leap to cover to restore you spent MP.

The combat feels fluid and fun, so despite simple controls it still feels skillful.

You also have a defense button, where if held Noct will shiftstep to avoid incoming attacks, and if held in the right moments can initiate a parry for Noct to counter and strike back for bigger damage. As you take damage, you lose HP, if you are brought down to critical, you can start to lose your maximum HP, which can really make the battles a slog to get through.

Then there are a handful of other fight mechanics to help make things easier as well. You have a pair of gauges that charge up as you deal damage. One of them is your team up gauge where you can expend 1 to 3 bars with your individual party members for a team attack, but once you learn Ignus's regroup you have little reason to use anything else because it warps everyone to him and restores everyone to near full health. You have a gauge around your weapons that when activated puts you in what I call a frenzy mode, where Noct just goes ham with the ancient weapons he's found while taking next to no damage, and can be finished with a 4 member team attack. Finally there are summons, where in this Final Fantasy they are fight enders. Almost nothing survives a cast summon. The problem is I've yet to figure out what things need to happen to actually activate a summon, so when the music changes and the prompt appears, just hit it and finish the fight.

So long as you can hold out in a fight, Ramuh will eventually finish it for you.

Items for the most part don't change in this Final Fantasy but some of their functions do differ. For example being at 0 HP doesn't mean you are out of the fight, you are just weakened and slow. If you use a potion you regain HP and can get back in the fight, but if you use an Elixir you gain your HP back and restore back you maximum HP amount. Phoenix Downs return to bring back completely wiped out fighters back in the fight, and if you are quick enough you can use them to spare you from getting a game over as well.

Experience is treated a bit differently in this Final Fantasy as well. When you are out and about the world map fighting baddies you earn experience that goes into a pool for your characters individually. This is earned by defeating monsters, completing quests, or using items if you do it properly. But it doesn't actually go to leveling up your characters until you "bank it" by resting. You can do this at various camp locations across the map, renting out trailers to stay in, or if you can swing the cash to do so stay in hotels. Why would you pay money for hotels if you can camp for free? Because the nicer location you stay in determines the bonus to the experience you get when you cash in, so you can boost your levels if you can afford to stay in nicer places.

"Camping is so comfortable thanks to this reliable and affordable COLEMAN camping equipment!"

One of the perks to camping however, is that one of party members (Ignus) will cook for the group. Cooking and eating meals can provide various party effects such as more stamina, better damage, bonus HP, or even experience boosting. You can also dine at restaurants without having to rest but obviously this costs money to do as well. Depending on the locations you've found or the quests you have done, This can be manipulated in a way that allows you to really cash in on the experience you earn to get the jump on the levels. 

Final Fantasy has finally taken that hard look at Skyrim and said "Huh, gamers really seem to like this open world thing. Maybe that's why they didn't like Final Fantasy 13's 20 hour linear corridor maps." It's about time. I don't know when Square thought less freedom was a good idea but they finally wised up and when full blown open world. Not complete freedom as some areas are locked off at the onset, and you can't drive anywhere that doesn't have a road, but it does allow for some multiple forms of travel and is pretty massive in scale.

So while you have your main story quests to complete, as you make pit stops around the map you will come across NPCs, shops, and eateries that will provide side quests for you to do. On top of the regular experience bonuses these provide they will also allow you to find new weapons and gear, hunt monsters to earn money (money is scarce in this game), unlock new recipes for bonus effects, and find more of the the Lucian weapons. I felt very reminded of Dragon Age: Inquisition or Skyrim that it was very easy to find myself moving from sidequest to sidequest and never actually getting to progressing with the story. I had to tell myself to move on at points.

Gear in this game is kept thankfully simple this time around. Noctis is the only character that can use everything, and the other 3 party members can only use specific gear so it shouldn't do much to complicate things. Get everyone the best available armor and weapons, and figure out what weapons you like to use for Noct. I personally stuck to the short sword, knives, one of the Lucian weapons, and a spell for my main slot set up.

Lucian weapons are tricky, by the way. While they are significantly more powerful than weapons you can buy along the way, but they come at a cost. Just by using them your health will immediately begin to deplete. But even if you don't use them in battle, they can have a significant affect on your base statistics. I was getting my ass kicked regularly at one point and I couldn't figure out why. Apparently, I later found out, that the Lucian axe I had equipped for my heavy weapon had reduced my defense to next to nothing for a massive attack boost, so you have to chose your gear carefully.

Magic is also a different beast. Its based around this Elemancy system they created. Essentially you have have 3 magic elementals of fire, ice, and lightning (a call back to FF1 perhaps?). You basically can collect elements along the world map, then harness them into a casting of a spell. The amount you use increases the potency which I assume correlates to how much damage they can do, and the right selection of abilities as you level allow you decrease the cost or increase the power as you make spells.

But there is a 4th option to elemancy as well where you can add a random item to the spell to give them bonus effects. Some of them use poison or stun, I used them make my spells quadra or quinta casts so using the spell once basically resulted in a massive nuclear strike for a huge area. This for some reason also hits your party as well but it doesn't appear to deal any damage to you. But the real kicker, and pretty much the only reason I used magic is you can use debased coins to make them cast with XP boost. So basically every time you cast a spell you get a free experience dump. Compounded with what you've learned about boosting experience from food and sleeping, you can really surge in levels if you do it properly.

Given everything I've said as you can clearly tell, this is not the cookie cutter JRPG that Bravely Default is for example. It's something I thought I wanted for Final Fantasy but if I am being completely honest, I actually really got into the changes to system. It felt seamless, there was still a degree of skill required to do it well, and the difficulty is skewed in a way that it really never feels easy. If something out levels you, you have to play things very carefully otherwise its going to be a constant scramble to keep using your items to keep you alive.

Much like how they started to in Final Fantasy X, there is a real sense of scale to all the baddies in this game as some monsters are teeny in size like the lovable cactaur, to brontosaurusly massive in scale to where you are only really hacking at a monsters ankles during a fight. And what I like about this is some of the lumbering monsters are generally passive in nature, so you can scoot right on by them without getting locked into a fight you don't want to be in.

As I have mentioned the game if fairly open world, so you will be doing a lot of back and forth exploring, the problem is it doesn't exactly allow you the freedom of travel like a Grand Theft Auto would provide. You are given this slick ride and given a massive map. You select a few sidequests to do and realize it would be much faster to cut across the field to get there. BZZZT. Nope, you have to stick to the roads. The car will literally not let you veer into the other lanes or off road unless there is a dirt trail to allow you to do so. So nine out of ten times you won't even bother driving yourself because there is no point. No freedom. Just let Ignis do it.

Or, just say fuck it and fast travel to the nearest point you can, and then ride a chocobo as close as you can. You rent them for dirt cheap for day spans so spend for the week and you can summon them at will. You will be covering a lot of ground so you should anyways because they get stronger and more effective as you do.

The music in this one is pretty good. I don't know if I would say that the music of Final Fantasy XV is notable, but that's because while you travel you can purchase CDs for your car of all the older Final Fantasy soundtracks, which I absolutely would rather be listening to. So most of the time I wasn't even hearing the XV soundtrack. The battle music is cool and does feel epic, and the music you hear during the weird pinball game at eateries are metal as fuck so that rocks. The game also opens up with a soft rendition of Stand by Me, which was a surprising change of pace to have an actual licensed song that wasn't from Nobuo Uematso.

I played this much longer than I probably should have.

So as I've mentioned you have your main story quests, you have your monster hunts (which seems to be the primary way to make money), and you have your side quests. The problem with this selection is that if you stick to the story quests, Final Fantasy XV is going to be an incredibly short game. I believe some Japanese gamers clocked it down to just under 14 hours. For a spectacle fighter or action adventure game that's pretty standard, but for a Final Fantasy it really isn't. So expect yourself to do some sidequests if you want to make the most of this game.

The problem with the sidequests is that the people who give them are just awful. Sure, it shows off some fairly impressive character design in the way that NPCs don't feel so generic when compared to the main cast. But a lot of them are just insufferable from a voice acting perspective. It's like they looked at the characters they were going to voice and just decided instead of finding a voice that seemed natural for the character, they would let a voice actor go nuts and try some new things they were fooling around with. They run this barrage of just awful character actor sounds: Dumb Hillbilly, Tough Lady, Italian Mobster, Annoying Bostonian. I tried to listen to quests, but some these characters were just awful.

While I'm on the subject of voice acting, let's talk about Eos as a whole shall we? I am very confused about the nature of this universe, Final Fantasy XV. You start me off meeting a widened old king and let me take control of an angsty hero, a British chef, and mullety toughguy, and wet diaper. Then literally right at the onset of the game, I feels like I'm driving in the midwest only everyone who lives there is a transplant from the deep south. With Cindy I don't mind it so much because I think she is adorable but the entire continent talking like the cast of Hee-Haw while wearing stylish future clothing is sending me a lot of mixed fucking messages.

The story in this game is a fucking mess, really. Honestly if you held a gun to my head and asked to me explain it I'd probably still be getting shot in the knee at best. I can mention some of the major aspects of it but honestly most of them main game is so unmemorable I vaguely remember what quests were actual story based missions and which were asides not based off the main narrative. Some of them I wonder why they are even in the game. It does the whole Evil Empire thing but then it will have you literally rubbing elbows with the games primary antagonist. There is a section where where you fight this hired gun out to stop you, and then literally the very next time you see her she joins your party. Consistency is not Final Fantasy XV's strong suit.

It's not a real likable main cast of characters either. Noctis is your prototypical spiky haired angsty machine. He's there to swing his sword and "pfft" or "tsch" his range of emotion during scenes. Ignis seems like he could be a cool character but honestly it seems like all the stuff that happens to him that develops him as a character happens without the player ever getting to see it. Prompto fucking sucks, he is a whiny ineffectual snot who I would leave locked in the trunk if I could. There is a particular story heavy mission where he casually drops this massive reveal about his character, that has about as jarring an effect as if you told me it was sunny out today. And Gladiolus could have been my favorite character but he's an inconsistent hypocrite, he straight up leaves the group to take care of some of his own shit and then when a major story event takes place he proceeds to be fucking shitty to a character for the remainder of the game for no fucking reason. This team sucks.

Which is a shame because there are some pretty great characters in this game. For a brief stint you get Gladiolus' sister Iris in your party and on top of fighting along side you, she's actually charming and fun. So of course she's gone before you get to enjoy it. The aforementioned hired gun, Areana Highwind, is a throwback to the Dragoon class who is a hardened mercenary and kind of bad ass, so naturally you get her for one mission and she's gone, which is a shame because as you talk to her you get a sense of where her loyalty actually is and its interesting. Hell I would have taken getting Cindy in the party just to hear her southern drawl as I traveled across the world map. In this game's defense though, I will admit I missed a lot of the individual character quests because I never made camp because there is no XP boost and camping is what makes most of them appear.

I would have swapped any of these characters to keep Iris on the team.

My hands down biggest problem with the game however, is the fucking product placement. There is one small one (a small American Express sign I didn't even notice) and 3 very egregious examples that I can cite: One, In the Kingsglaive film, in several rather prominent shots the film really drives home that they are driving around in a very stylish looking Audi (that they actually produced one of, that sold for like 350k). Two, In almost every scene where the team is at a campfire, the Coleman brand is prominently displayed on the camping equipment that is well centered in practically every single camping shot. And third, is sprinkled throughout billboards and shops are ads, and even the product of Cup Noodles.

Which would be fine by itself, but there is an actual fucking quest line about eating fucking Cup Noodles, and how you make Cup Noodles better to have the "ultimate flavor experience". Spoiler alert, it ends with the whole team realizing that after all the effort they put in Cup Noodles are just great as they are. FUCK. YOU. This was so ham-handledly crammed into the game I swear to god I almost stopped playing. Listening to Gladiolus sing the praises of the ambrosia of the gods that is fucking Cup Noodles was just product placement at sickening levels. Try to watch that mission and not get douchechills. Fuck you, Cup Noodles. Unless a particularly shitty game comes out this year, Cup Noodles is the 2017 worst of the year. Book It.

This is getting longwinded so I better wrap things up. Final Fantasy XV is not the last ditch hail mary masterpiece I think SquareEnix was hoping it would be, but it did end up being successful. They tried something different again and for the most part it does provide a pretty enjoyable experience. Is it the best Final Fantasy in the series? Not by a longshot. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth your time. If they had maybe dialed back on making everything epic in scale and fancy looking and spent a little more time formulating a more coherent storyline, and sold it all together instead of with movies and demos, Final Fantasy XV could have truly been something special.

Sadly, its not. But its still good. Definitely the one of the best showings of the game for any of the series after Final Fantasy X. They are still going to add a few more DLC chapters to the game to flesh out some of the things you can do and extend on the story a little bit but ultimately that comes as a too little too late for me. Final Fantasy XV is a pretty solid play and I would say I certainly got my monies worth out of it. Maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10.

I'd bump it to an 8 if it didn't have Promto.