Recent reviews by 9IR_nullfield

The Good:
+ Deceptively huge variety of monsters to encounter and breed.
+ High level of customization allows you to personalize your team to your heart's content.
+ Extremely receptive developer.
+ Plenty of hidden secrets to improve replayability and give extra things to do.
+ Charming retro GBC aesthetic that varies just enough from other titles on the market to be unique.
+ Relatively active community dedicated to exploring and finding secrets.

The Bad:
- More bugs than could possibly be listed.
- Combat tends to be minimalistic and a bit of an afterthought at times.
- Plot is a tad simplistic and the actual interesting elements tend to be relegated to background subtext.
- Certain mechanics, especially any online ones, feel more like exploits than intentional additions.
- Balancing is strange at first and falls apart entirely the further you go in the game.

The Ugly:
-- More crashes, softlocks, and game-breaking bugs than could possibly be listed.
-- Extreme lack of polish and refinement throughout the game.
-- Switch version lacks a lot of the safeguards and hotkeys that prevent bugs from completely messing up your save file.

Monster Crown is an odd monster-catching game that hearkens back to the good old days of Pokemon RBY, but due to a combination of both its deliberately eerie, slightly-off atmosphere and monumental amount of design quirks and glitches, every playthrough I've done so far ends up reading like a Pokemon-inspired creepypasta. To wit:

>I've nearly bricked my save multiple times.
>I accidentally turned myself into a monster that doesn't exist in the game and had to reset before it was permanent.
>I've inadvertently locked myself in the final dungeon with no way out because the hallways looped back into themselves instead of returning you to the previous level.
>I was the first player to report on the official bug-tracker that an important NPC had a clone sitting in the middle of the ocean who'd trap you into an unending cutscene if you got near her.
>I found a monster whose special gimmick is "you can't actually attack me because the attack button doesn't work against me and if you try to switch I'll just force you to replay your switching animation dozens of times a second until the game crashes."
>I found multiple Missingno-esque piles of pixels strolling around in a glitchy island that shouldn't exist multiple world map lengths beyond the world map.
>I've freely duplicated my strongest monster to sell for infinite money (it's my strongest because it glitched past the stat caps and literally has over double the health of the strongest boss ingame and it's still going up after reaching max level what in the absolute world), then created a nerfed version of that monstrosity with some of the worst attacking stats in the game and a sane amount of health, only to find out it still breaks everything over its nonexistent spectral knee just by its sheer presence and abuse of combat mechanics.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Granted, many of these bugs have been patched out already - but all of these were fully present upon its graduation from an Early Access title, and many continue to be at large to the day of this review's writing (especially the Switch version, which is perpetually behind on updates compared to the PC version due to Nintendo's patching process and which I would recommend against getting at all right now, especially as it lacks some of the safeguards like the emergency unstuck command the PC version has if you press 9).

This isn't to say that the game is unplayable if you look past the bugs: at its core, it's a fairly quaint (if at times minimalistic) monster-catching game with a strong focus on breeding up your strongest catches and mashing together their stats to create your own purpose-built war machines. The actual combat elements are fairly simplistic and there's only a few gimmicks to combat to truly dig into like the synergy system - but, after a certain point in the game when you've gotten established, any new creatures you find while exploring tend to be so statistically outclassed by your little war machines that their main purpose is to serve as equippable skins for your pre-built team, instead of new creatures in their own right. Emphasizing customizability over the individual monsters wouldn't be a bad thing on its own, but there's so little incentive to do anything other than immediately maximize the stats on everything you can get your hands on that it does remove a lot of the personalization that'd otherwise be present, and that's further exacerbated by a small list of two dozen or so moves that so vastly tower over everything else by the end of the game that it feels pointless to use anything else. Getting to this point on your own might take a bit depending on your knowledge of the game mechanics, but touch any of the online mechanics - whether they be net eggs, the pedigree site, or trading - and the entire game might as well play itself after that.

To give credit where credit is due, the developer is very active on the official Discord and even the Steam forums, and has been fairly open about the fact that this is his first major public game release, so a lot of these little cracks and rough edges have a good chance of being smoothed out within the next few years as feedback is implemented and the code receives a thorough polish. But frankly, it's still shocking that Monster Crown was brought out of Early Access in the state it's in, and much of my playtime has come from hunting down glitches in anticipation of what sort of absurd issue I'll run into next rather than enjoying the game itself.

Regardless of the reasons, I've enjoyed my time playing the game - but it's definitely not for everyone, and has a few too many issues at this point in time to recommend. If you don't mind a bit of jank, or just want to play what might very well be the physical embodiment of every Mew-under-the-truck urban myth, vaguely-creepy Pokemon romhack, and scuffed Missingno.-style glitch out there - Monster Crown might be for you. But if you want a full, polished, complete game that's firmly out of Early Access territory, avoid this like the plague for now.

NGS is a disappointment.

The basic framework of the game is fun, combat is fast and fluid, movement feels swift and-- that's it. That's all there is right now once you get past character creation. There are currently 6-12 hours of content total before the game boils down to "run around with 8 people in your choice of one of three identical circles, chasing down quest markers and beating up the same two-dozen enemies over and over again for minimal rewards and EXP."

Monetization in this game is also almost downright predatory and has gotten significantly worse since NGS's release compared to the original PSO2 - and it was never terribly good to begin with, given the game's history of extreme overreliance on limited-edition exclusives and gambling roulettes for virtually all cosmetics. For instance -
Want to sell anything you have, no matter how valuable or worthless it might be? $10 monthly, because all F2P access to basic selling functions on the player market has been permanently discontinued as of NGS's release.
Want something to wear beyond the game's default 1-2 costumes, in a game where character customization is billed as one of the main draws? Pay up or pray that you can afford to buy any released cosmetics you want from someone paying for the premium sub before they've cycled out (because they're all limited-edition).
You get hovering emotes for walking/running when you start out the game, but want to complete the animation set and see them when you're dashing too (aka. 80% of the time)? Spend nearly the price of two full AAA games buying 40 different random items in the first limited-edition cosmetics gambling roulette and it'll be given to you as a special bonus. (And don't forget to pay for the $10 premium too or else you won't be able to sell the inevitable duplicates you get.)

At the moment this is the framework of a framework (of a framework) and is far less complete than most Early Access titles or even some demos, despite being billed as a full-release MMO. The core gameplay is fun enough to draw you in for a bit and make you wish for more content on top of what's already present, but there's little sense in sitting around and waiting for that wish to materialize for half a year or more. Even if you can stomach the monetization issues, just check back when there's actually a game behind the overpriced RMT gambling.

Siralim Ultimate is the latest in a passion-project series of monster-catching RPGs that has, for better or worse, found its niche and makes little attempt to compromise on that fact. While its Steam page brands it as "Pokemon meets Diablo" and "Dragon Quest Monsters meets Path of Exile," I think a far more apt comparison is "Magic: the Gathering meets Disgaea" - it's a very teambuilding-focused number-cruncher of a dungeon crawler where success is more often than not found well before you've embarked by gathering the tools you have access to and poring over exactly what you want your plucky team of six to focus on. Outside of the teambuilding, Siralim Ultimate consists of taking your monsters and systematically venturing out into a endless array of procedurally-generated mazes to smack down enemies and hoover up any resources or treasure you may come upon before moving on.


As of the time of writing this, Siralim Ultimate has over 900 monsters, nearly 30 classes, and hundreds of mechanically distinct spells which are slowly unlocked and drip-fed to you as you roam about a variety of randomly-generated dungeons. Due to the sheer quantity there's absolutely some stinkers in there, but it also means that no matter what bizarre gameplan you have, it's likely that with time and experimentation you'll find some obscure combination hidden somewhere in the game to facilitate it. It's just as possible to make a well-rounded team that focuses on reinforcing its stats turn by turn and winning via a metaphorical arms race as it is to use one creature that balls up and cannibalizes the entire rest of your party to steal their abilities and go on a rampage. This is further encouraged by the unique traits each monster comes with, which are outwardly simple and straightforward but with enough lateral thought can synergize with your own class-granted abilities and other monsters in your team to create a dizzying spiral of effects that can easily result in hundreds of chained effects before you've even started a battle. It's very much the RPG equivalent of building a Magic: the Gathering deck, right down to a five-element color wheel that all monsters and spells are thematically divvied into (namely Sorcery, Chaos, Life, Death, and Nature.) Other unlockables and interwoven systems are also abundant, including a diverse array of cosmetics you can rarely find scattered throughout the realms.

Graphics? Better than before, but your mileage may vary.
Also worthy of mention: Since the last game in the series, Siralim 3, there's also been a major graphics overhaul. Previous games had, for lack of a more polite phrasing, a distinctly grungy artstyle for both creatures and the environment, which combined with the frequent blocky tilesets and jet-black UI, left previous Siralim games feeling fairly ugly and unpolished. While the revamp hasn't shed its particular brand of sprite-based, SNES-inspired retro aesthetic, it's got its own sort of minimalist charm now and is a massive improvement over what it used to be. The screenshots and clips on the product page are pretty indicative of what things look like now, so I'll leave it to your own interpretation whether it passes muster or not.
(Special exception goes to fusion, a gamplay feature you unlock quite early on that allows your creatures to gain a second creature's trait: while you can opt to blend the color palettes of the two monsters together in a few separate ways, the color channels usually aren't set up very well and 90% of the time you'll end up with a gory mess of color and stray pixels. Mercifully, an option exists to freely swap to the original color if you don't like the results.)


Is this enough for me to universally recommend Siralim Ultimate? No, not at all. If you're here looking for challenging, fast-paced fights or a cohesive, tightly-wound narrative, this game is probably not for you - there can be tense moments in the minute-to-minute combat, but nine times out of ten, depending on how much you've prepared for whatever enemies are thrown at you, you'll either casually annihilate enemies thrice as strong as you or die a quick, inglorious death. And the writing of the main plot is far, far from cinematic: even after a much-needed overhaul to remove many of the most egregious instances of toilet humor, it still tends to be fairly minimalistic, tongue-in-cheek, and (for better or worse) self-aware of the fact that it probably won't engage the player's interest for long. The repetition of the realm-to-realm gameplay can also be a drag: while the game allows you to swap out members of your team on the fly to vary things up, sticking with a single team for dozens or possibly even hundreds of realms can either be a very relaxed, almost zen experience or a mind-numbing grind depending on your outlook.

Early Access?

Siralim Ultimate is still in Early Access at the time of writing this - gameplay systems are still being introduced and many monsters and other monsters/cosmetics (particularly those slated for inclusion as a result of the game's successful Kickstarter campaign) are still being added. As a result, the game isn't quite feature-complete. However, the developer, Thylacine Studios, has an excellent track record regarding previous Early Access releases: I'm not normally fond of saying this, but if you're leery of buying this game due to the Early Access tag, don't be.


The Siralim series as its core is a very unique experience that encourages lateral thinking and creative out-of-the-box solutions to tackle its gameplay, and Siralim Ultimate is in almost every way an upgrade over its predecessors in the things it does best. If you've been dissatisfied with or written off previous Siralim games, this still remains a very niche series that requires a particularly methodical mindset to enjoy and get the most of. But if you all you want is a very modular RPG experience you can use to painstakingly handcraft and improve upon your own little dream team of blatantly overpowered bogeymen, well - Siralim Ultimate is one of the best out there.

Buyer beware:
This game is a port of a PS4/Switch game that was released to Steam after a 6-month delay with many features nowhere to be seen (namely, all netplay-related game features - including but not limited to a custom map editor and the ability to be invaded by other players' AI-controlled parties), and the localization company responsible, NISA, deliberately went out of their way to avoid mentioning said omissions until well after the game's release.

While I'm personally a huge fan of the Disgaea games and would recommend Disgaea 5 to anyone who liked former games in the series or to SRPG fans in general, I can't give this port of the game anything other than a Not Recommended due to deceptive advertising ("Complete" this edition is not). If I had known about the alterations ahead of time, I'd have saved my money. Only buy this if you have absolutely no plans in picking up a PS4/Switch in the near future and/or don't mind missing out on many postgame mechanics, for whatever reason.

(I will change this review if these features are ever readded, but as the company has already made a statement well after the release window saying that there were "irreconciliable" platform differences that made adding them impossible (and gently reminding buyers that refunds exist for those who have spent less than 2 hours ingame), I'm doubtful it will happen.)

Chang'e, are you watching?!

This game destroyed my hard drive. Highly recommended for Zen Buddhists in training - all other sources of anger will feel minor by comparison. 10/10

Pros:
+ The backgrounds are fairly pretty and have a very TRON-esque aesthetic.
+ Driving around in the generated tracks is fairly fun.
+ If you're interested in shooting for leaderboard ranks, the game can gain quite a bit of replay value.

Cons:
- All the backgrounds are purple or red; they're supposed to be color-coded based on genre, but all the game does to determine genre is browse last.fm for artist tags. If you regularly listen to little-known artists or last.fm doesn't have the artist on its list, the song is automatically tagged as dance, which means all you'll ever see is the same exact bright purple backdrop.
- There's no actual "racing" in this game - it's basically a drifting/stunt simulator, because by its design the game doesn't allow you to race. Any time you get ahead or behind the tempo of the song you're "racing," your speed will be rubberbanded until you're back up to pace with the tempo of the song.
- Gets old very, very fast unless you're specifically a fan of stunt driving. Most songs in your library will be 1-2 star songs which involve going in a straight line with no obstacles 75% of the time, and your harder songs will never have anything you haven't seen before (every track in this game is composed of turns, jumps, obstacles, loops/corkscrews, and boosters/pickups; there's never anything else).
- .m4a support was completely broken a few updates back, meaning anyone who relies on iTunes for most of their music and doesn't convert to .mp3 is out of luck. The devs have said they're fixing it, but it's been broken since March.
- Around a dozen different cars to unlock and drive, but they all handle exactly the same.
- Not much of a community; leaderboards are only competitive with very popular songs or the bundled songs, otherwise you'll be lucky to get 3-4 people who have raced a song on the leaderboard.
- Always-on DRM that locks you out of playing the game if you're not connected to their server.
- The game's servers can be unstable.
- Visual clutter makes obstacles look almost exactly the same as stairs or track walls - this gets even worse when you exceed the tempo of your current song, covering everything with a heavy blur effect.

This game isn't a rhythm game at all, and it's a racing game in name only. If you're a fan of either of those types of games then consider picking Riff Racer up when it's on sale because it still might give you a few hours of entertainment despite its flaws. Otherwise I can only recommend it to diehard fans of stunt driving games.

For those unfamiliar with NIS games, Cladun Returns fits their usual profile: it's a RPG second, grindathon and minmaxer's paradise first. The combat system and overall gameplay is deceptively simple. it's an action RPG vaguely similar to the Legend of Zelda series, where you control a character with a limited selection of abilities in a gridless battlefield filled with enemies and traps - most of the mind-numbing complexity comes from the insane amount of customization options and the Magic Circle system, which bolsters your main character's stats and abilities by using your other characters as something like equipment pieces. It's the same basic setup as previous entries in the Cladun series, but Cladun Returns packs in a lot of new extra features, such as additional randomly-generated dungeons, new weapon types, and new enemies. It's also a far more competent port than Cladun x2, its predecessor.

NIS games can typically be played by those not interested in endless grinds, because those features usually start up after you've already finished the game. Cladun Returns is no different, and the main campaign can be finished with only minimal detours and grinding. Unfortunately, the additions from Cladun x2 aren't very noticeable in the main campaign, and the storyline in x2 is far more complete and interesting than the plot in Returns, for those who aren't well-versed in the Sengoku era of Japan (not that the plot is the main draw of either game, of course). Due to that, it's difficult to recommend Cladun Returns above Cladun x2 to casual fans of the series.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this above Cladun x2 to diehard fans of NIS games, numbercrunchers, or people looking for an endless grind either. The draw of the Cladun series is that the postgames transition to being intense roguelites all about slogging through randomly-generated 99-floor dungeons for loot and profit. Theoretically, the added dungeons, enemies, and customization features should make this a superior product to x2 in spite of its slightly weaker storyline - the main problem is the added content and especially the new customization features, which are often poorly playtested and sometimes downright gamebreaking.

(For example: one of the new enemy types, a giant multi-headed serpent based on Yamata no Orochi, appears in the third chapter of the main storyline - due to its wonky stat scaling you can barely scratch it, so the "best" way to fight it is to stand directly behind it so it whiffs with all of its attacks and plink it to death over the course of 4 minutes. A lot of the other new content is equally tedious, with many of the new enemies relying on lengthy invulnerability phases - the only new content that seemed to be worthwhile and fun were the new weapon types, and to some extent the new dungeon varieties.)

As far as the actual gamebreaking components go, the main culprits are the additions to the title system (which allows you to add prefixes to equipment to give yourself passive benefits). While titles in x2 typically gave useful bonuses but were almost never downright essential, some of the new titles introduced in Returns allow you to never trigger traps while walking on them (removing one of the biggest difficulties of the game), bring back all equipment earned from a dungeon run even if you get a Game Over (nullifying any real consequence for defeat), and increase all of your damage resistances to the point that you become completely immune to all attacks (nullifying every other challenge remaining).

Due to the fact that Cladun Returns allows you to add these titles to sufficiently powerful weapons through a new feature at the blacksmith shop, it's very easy to achieve effective immortality very early into the postgame if you know what you're doing, making any further grinding completely pointless. Given the entire premise of NIS games is endlessly grinding in the postgame to grow stronger, the title additions undercut the game's entire premise - why take 300 hours to boost your stats to absurd levels, when you can be handed total immortality in 30?

I love the Cladun series and I definitely enjoyed my time in Cladun Returns, so it's painful to give this game a review of Not Recommended. But as it stands, there's little reason to purchase this game over its (significantly cheaper) predecessor. Sometimes less is more.

This game has not been patched since shortly after release (~5 months at the time of this review) and still currently suffers from major stability isssues, frequent crashing, and other game-breaking issues:

- The game has frequent issues with many NVidia Geforce GTX-series cards, even ones far above the minimum/recommended specs, and will crash every 10-20 minutes due to memory leaks. This can even happen to some users with AMD cards, from reports on the forum.
- The game is horribly optimized and will also crash many integrated Intel GPUs that are otherwise more than capable of running the game, in particular one long dungeon very early in the game called Sakura Park.
- The game is lacking a Japanese-only balance patch that fixes glaring oversights regarding the game's combat system and scaling, namely with activated skills and EXE drives (aka. hypers) falling off into complete uselessness past the early game.
- There is frequent stuttering and delay within the menus that can lead to crashes, especially with one of the graphics cards mentioned above. One of the July patches that IFI released helped the problem and made the stuttering far less noticeable, but it still happens.

However, the abandonment of this game by the devs is particularly concerning, as IFI has done this once in the past. A previous game in the series, Neptunia Re:Birth2, saw IFI completely drop support for it while the game suffered from constant crashes, rolled back several problematic attempted fixes, and then did nothing for the rest of the game's lifespan. It still has not been patched.

Overlooking the problems, Neptunia VII is a surprisingly good RPG with a long and indepth (if silly and whimsical) storyline, decent humor, and moderately challenging fights. I have been a fan of the series for years, but VII's abandonment by its developers in spite of its balance issues and lack of stability means I can't easily recommend this to anyone looking for a complete experience, especially not with this pricetag.