Recent reviews by Meow

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The Watcher is a fairly short campaign, I completed it in around 7 hours. I have heard there might be another ending but as of writing this review I only found one ending.

One complaint I used to hear from people is that Rain World is an unfair, punishing game. The Watcher may have been tailored to address this complaint. After you get to the new content the old karma gate system is no longer used and you can progress to different regions without any karma requirements.

Dying is also not a huge deal as there are checkpoints when you travel to new regions under certain conditions, I won't spoil what this means for people who have yet to experience the DLC but this also makes death less impactful.

The Watcher (the Slugcat) is fairly interesting. They aren't combat oriented and they don't have any insanely strong superpowers like some of the Downpour Slugcats, instead they have stealth powers and as you progress through the story you unlock more abilities but again, I will refrain from spoiling these.

The new regions are very pretty, I enjoyed exploring them even if there's not a whole lot to do other than sightsee in some of them. The new creatures and mechanics in these regions are great. Downpour added new creatures to the world but they were very similar to existing creatures. The Watcher does add some creatures like this but there are some unique creatures that are a welcome addition to the world of Rain World.

I want to mention some miscellaneous things like the music and cutscene art, as well as the visual effects that happen in-game. These are all great and made me want to explore even more so I could experience these new additions.

It's not all positive however. The story in The Watcher seems to have been an afterthought. Spoilers ahead as this needs to be mentioned for this complaint to make sense. The starting cutscene seems to show the watcher and their family being attacked by another Slugcat. Their family chase this assailant only to leave the Watcher behind, and I can only guess that at this point the Watcher becones lost and alone. This sets up for for a story where you either find your family or encounter the Slugcat who attacked you, but this never happens. This whole plot point goes nowhere. Instead you encounter an echo and follow after them as you travel to different regions. There were even some cutscenes where The Watcher dreams of their family so this confuses me even more as to why this bit of the story never got resolved.

The writing for the echo character you follow also seems slightly out of place for the game. We've seen from other echoes that many of them were eccentric and had odd speech mannerisms but the echo you chase after in this DLC talks in a way I can only describe as someone who spends too much time on the internet.

I've seen some people complaining about there being a lack of a consistent theme with the regions but I personally liked all the variety with the new regions. It would be weird if they were connected by regular karma gates as well, going from a dry desert area to a frozen megastructure to a swamp would be strange if we were to believe these regions were all located right next to eachother.

Overall I enjoyed all of the gameplay aspects of the DLC but found the story and writing to be weak. The price of the DLC also seems a bit expensive considering it's the same price as Downpour. I heard that this DLC was going to be bigger than Downpour but from what I've seen it was much shorter. To be fair I did only find 1 ending and I have yet to go back to use the Watcher's powers on those areas with rifts that don't seem to do anything, maybe if I use my powers there I might unlock even more regions. I will update my review if I discover there's more to the game than I previously thought.

As a single campaign DLC for an existing game I would give The Watcher a 7/10. It gave me the same feeling of excitement and wonder I had when I first played Rain World when it first came out on PC. I enjoy getting lost and just exploring the world and The Watcher is a good buy if that's what you want.

Gud game

It's GOTY.

gud game

gud game

Tactics Ogre: Reborn is my favourite version of Let Us Cling Together. I have played the original release, the PSP version, the One Vision mod and the Chronicle Valeria ROM hack yet I still find Reborn to be the best version of the game.
I've completed a no-chariot, no-incap, no retreat run with mostly generics and I've played through each route, beat the 12 generals and completed the final CODA battle with just the 3 main characters so I think have a good idea of how Reborn fares compared to previous releases.

I'm going to throw a TL;DR here because I don't write many reviews so I'm probably not good at writing them and I may end up rambling:
- If you're put off by complexity but aren't concerned with having less content/variety then play the SNES release
- If you don't mind a tedious amount of grinding, are put off by randomness or you want a (reasonably) balanced iteration of this game play the One Vision mod
- If you care a lot about quality of life features, can't stand reading or want a voice acted experience play Reborn

I'll mainly be comparing Reborn to the PSP version since they're so similar so if you're unfamiliar with the game already this review isn't really going to help you decide if you should buy the game (although it is a pretty good game and I do recommend it)

The Good:
- Practically no grinding required. The game throws EXP at you in spades from story battles, EXP charms and if that's not enough training battles exist.
- The levelling system is back to the per-unit system as opposed to the PSP version's class level system
- The crafting system no longer has a chance to fail and if you don't have the ingredients but they can be purchased from the shop you can just add the cost of the ingredients to the cost of the crafting which saves a lot of time.
- The redone music is great. Most of the tracks in Reborn have become my favourite versions of the tunes from the Ogre Battle series. There are a few which I feel are inferior to the PSP's renditions (namely Accretion Disk) but they are by no means bad
- The Japanese voice acting is a nice addition. It adds a lot of impact to the more emotional scenes
- Recruitment for a couple of unique characters has been made less time consuming
- The skill and magic bloat has been reduced from the PSP version, skills that affect movement have been moved onto the +1 variants of armour and some skills that were barely worth a slot on your characters have been made into auto-skills which can turn the tide of battle yet cost no MP or actions. Skills that were all but required in the PSP version have either been moved to equipment or built into characters (the unit element system replaces augment element)

The Bad:
- Item progression through the story is a bit of a drag, magic classes have to wear linen slops throughout the entirety of the main campaign.
- RNG plays a larger role in Reborn. Status spells in the PSP version usually had around a 50% chance to hit in the early game but in Reborn be expected to see chances as low as 20% for even average enemies. Buff cards are a new feature added to reborn which I'm not a fan of, they can spawn almost anywhere on the map and while there seems to be something in place to ensure a variety of different types of cards show up there's nothing stopping a bunch of power up cards appearing on the other side of the battlefield while a bunch of auto-skill activation cards appear on your side when you have a team that has little benefit from these cards. Auto-skills are a nice way to simplify some classes but if you're unlucky and they never activate then you can be left with a dead weight unit who can't do their job, sure buff card skills exist to increase the change to activate these skills but the cards themselves are subject to RNG. Another weird and honestly unwelcome addition is a slight randomisation to the stats gained from levelling up, it's not like Fire Emblem where you can get a garbage level where you only get +1 luck but you have a chance to gain an extra point in some stats. I don't know the full extent of this but I have tested it by feeding EXP charms to a level 1 units all the way to level cap, writing their stats down, reloading and doing it again only to find there is some variance across all of their stats. This isn't a major issue and most players aren't even going to notice it but for idiot min-maxers (such as myself) this is rather booty blasting.
- Something that many complained about in the PSP version was how luck based the drop system was for endgame items and they didn't change this in Reborn. When hunting for relics there is no indication of which enemy will drop them and they aren't guaranteed to drop the item. This wouldn't be that bad but in the Palace of the Dead if you don't refer to a guide you may miss a lot of these on your way down. Honestly they should've gone with the system from The Knight of Lodis. In that game some units had rare/unique items and you could see these by checking their inventory and they also had a 100% chance to drop these items/spells. This is a simple but effective way to indicate how to obtain rare items because players will figure out after killing a couple of these units that the rare items will always drop.
- Random battles being removed may sound nice to reduce tedium but without them recruiting non-humans has become much harder, they could've just made it so training battles are possible outside of towns with the possibility of recruiting monsters, reptiles etc.
- Elemental charms have class restrictions but you can just ignore some of these restrictions. For instance Wizards can't become Dark but you can make them into Terror Knights, make them Dark and them switch back to Wizard. Some classes are also locked into Dark and even force you into Dark upon changing into them.
- Rogue being made an AI only class was reportedly done for AI optimisation (I can only guess that the AI didn't know how to use steal or traps) yet mages clearly have unoptimised AI but remain in the game

The Ugly:
- The character sprites. I'm not going to argue whether they are upscaled or redrawn but they just don't look as good as the sprites from the older releases.

Mixed:
- The English voice acting, Arycelle and Tartaros are notably worse than the other voice actor's delivery in my opninion. I dislike Arycelle's voice and Tartaros' voice doesn't fit with his character.
- The AI was advertised as being smarter and while some things about it do improve its chances against the player (like bosses not blindly charging into your army allowing you to beat the map in 5 minutes) some things about it just don't work (AI mages REFUSE to use status spells, you can give them no equipment and only status magic and they'll choose to punch the enemy over trying to use status spells)
- While I do like that the bloat from the PSP version is gone only having 4 slots for skills and spells is rather limiting. One skill slot will be used for a weapon skill on 90% of characters, for double attackers and mages another slot is taken to even make them usable.
- Class balance is better than in the PSP version and in combination with the return to unit levelling I found myself using a bunch of different classes throughout my playthrough, however some classes were nerfed a bit too much in my opinion: Archers are fine against squishy units but they deal laughable damage to front-line units, not just Knights but even classes like Beast Tamer just shrug arrows off. In addition to having a lot of their flexibility taken away, Mages are reliant on Meditate activating to actually be usable for a decent part of the game. Even then you may need to bring an MP restoration item on them in case your luck is abysmal so you don't have a unit just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Clerics suffer from the previous problem but their almost non-existent.
- The level cap does prevent people from just steamrolling the game but I wish it had a smoother curve.

Gang Garrison 3

It's GOTY

gud game