Nylige anmeldelser av Solnaga

*This review is 75 hours in, 100% achievements completed

Music
The music in this game is not Square Enix level, but nonetheless it's pretty good and what you'd expect from a JRPG. My personal favorite would be the BGM from the Factory.

Voice Acting
I played through the entire game in Japanese expecting the English dub to be cringe but when I watched some streams, it was actually good to my surprise. However, only the main story cutscenes have actual voice acting whereas all other dialogue is represented with only a "Hey".

Story
The story starts out interesting but soon falls short. After meeting Lofty about 5-10 hours in, the game follows a fairytale loop which came off as childish and uninteresting. The plot's concept was good. However, the problem was that the story never escalated or changed. While the game tried to add personality to the characters in each of the different chapters, the underlying narrative was still the same which lead to a very ingenuine experience. The ending of the story had some interesting twists albeit not interesting enough for me to recommend 30+ hours of gameplay to reach. Ironically, the sidestory was much better from the small character stories and lore while interacting with random NPCs; the kind that many people won't even bother interacting with or reading intently.

Difficulty & Combat
The difficulty in terms of combat starts off extremely easy and only gets hard enough to require a few potions during the main story content. Funny enough, The hardest part of the main story is actually a puzzle you have to encounter before meeting Lofty. There are two combat systems in this game- battles and skirmishes. The battles contribute the majority of the gameplay. Battles feel overal rather fluid and look good but ultimately end up being an mindless hack and slash because most your of your ranged abilities pale in comparison. Though the battles overall feel alright, it is utterly disappointing largely due to the low difficulty of the game. Skirmishes is battle system that involves 4 squadrons that are longer and more difficult but not very interesting. Lastly, Boss Fights are still just a mindless hack & slash each with a lazily introduced concept to make them "unique".

Issues

The Item system is my BIGGEST gripe about the game. While it's robust, its application makes it horrible.

• You rarely use potions and the drops you pick up are on par with the stores so they might as well not exist because I literally NEVER needed to use NPC shops.
  
• Cooking and eating food is equally pointless since you never need them.
  
• Treasure chests (including the locked ones) are horrible; they contain random usables or average gear so honestly didn't need them.
  
• Status effects might as well not exist in this game because you rarely ever encounter any yet there's a plethora of items to protect against them.
  
• Item crafting gets outpaced by the storyline so you don't need any until the endgame.
  
• Weapons and armors can only be crafted up to a quality of 10 and have a set bonus effect whereas loot dropped can have a quality up to 15 and can have unique effects such as Increased Rarity/Loot/Exp that don't exist with crafted items.
  
• RNG for drops is bad. You generally get low quality trash and most bonus effects are trivial.
  
• Uncursing and unlocking armor and weapon effects produce items that are still crap.

Then there's plenty of random *** I hate about the game:

• Who the ef decided to name the first kingdom Ding Dong Dell?
  
• There is WAY too much walking in this game and it slows the gameflow down drastically. 40% into the story you get the boat which is absolutely pointless because you get a damn airship in the next chapter.
  
• Playable characters are fine but you don't get two of your characters until 60% and 80% into the main story.
  
• Kingdom management is essentially pointless (but you should still do it) because you don't need shops and your gear outpaces your crafting. Also, once you've finished your kingdom, you become stuck at 9999999 KG with bolstering skirmishes being its only use.
  
• So much about the game isn't explained. To name a few: Nixing is apparently Silence but nowhere does the game explain this in NNK2. Shock Tactics is triggered when the bar around Evan is full by double tapping your Heavy Attack button but once again no information to be found here.
  
• End game is just as boring though the difficulty is definitely harder. End game content currently consists of farming materials in Dreamer Maze 10 for the end game gear, reattempting bosses with each success increase the bosses level by 5, collecting all the citizens & higgledies, finishing your kingdom, beating all the skirmishes, defeating all the tainted monsters, realizing that once you've defeated the 50 tainted monsters there's another 10 that pop up that you literally have to grind more for so no thanks.
  
• There's WAY too many higgledies and don't add much to the actual gameplay. The main benefit that some higgledies can provide is healing. They can also be used to improve your abilities. Otherwise, I barely bother to manage them.

TLDR:

While I do have plenty of negative things to say about this game, just remember I did play through it all and gave it more than a fair chance to shine. Unfortunately at the end of it all, I feel that NNK2 has plenty of potential and assets but fails to utilize any of it. As such, I can't recommend this game for more than $20 at this time. If you're a casual gamer that doesn't mind a mindless hack and slash, then this game would be fine but for someone looking for more from a game experience, I can't recommend it.

Stardew Valley easily gets "Haunts My Dreams" Award.

I couldn't stop thinking about this game while at work, planning out my days to come. What day of the month is it? What day of the week is it? Whose birthday is coming up? How far along are my crops? What season is coming up?
What crops should I invest in going forward? Who and what do I want to gift people? Should I go fishing today? When should I go fishing? Do I spend the day in the mines again? Is it raining tomorrow? Should I upgrade one of my tools today? What should I build next? Should I get a barn? Should I get coop? How do I make wine? What can I pickle? AHHHHHHHH THE QUESTIONS ARE ENDLESS~!!!!!!!!!!!!!



But god do I love this game. Stardew Valley is beautiful in the way it can cater towards different players. You can play it extremely casually without asking ANY of the questions I do, or you can be hardcore and ask ALL my questions EVERY day. At it's heart, the game is very relaxing and easily one of my highest regarded games.

*** DISCLAIMER: This game does start off very slow with seemingly nothing to do for the first 2-3 hours or about 7-10 days in game but I guarantee you that the experience will explode full force afterwards (as evident by the questions I listed). ***

This game hands down deserves to win "The Labor of Love" Award. It's been around for nearly 4 years and is still receiving consistent updates. Currently still holding the most hours played in my library at 525 hours, it definitely deserves credit where credit is due. By far the most worthwhile zombie survival crafting game. If you're going to purchase only one, this one better be it.

My nomination for "The Even Better Than I Expected" Award. I never played the original but it looked very fun. Boy was I wrong; it's better.

If you played and loved Gaunlet on GameCube, do not expect the same type of game here. This game is much more challenging and expect failure at first on higher difficulties. This game is designed with team coordination in mind. At Normal or Easy difficulties, the game is easy once you get the hang of it. But at Hard and Unfair, it becomes very challenging to play solo or with an uncoordinated team members since you have limited lives. This game is best played with friends or other people. Though it is doable even on Unfair difficulty, I would not recommend playing this game solo.

There seems to be some imbalance amongst the classes. Archer and Wizard are arguable the most reliable classes on Hard or Unfair difficulty due to their ability to kite. Valkyrie would be a close third with his overpowered spammable lance thrust and shield block. And Warrior is definitely the runt of the liter due to damage and survivability issues.

Warrior offers the least overall damage and the most difficulty avoiding damage while in combat. His weak attack is appalling and his strong attack is comparable to the Valkyrie's while being slower and having a smaller area of effect. The only redeemable quality about the Warrior is he unlocks a low-hp regeneration perk and he has the simplest control design.

Wizard has the most complex kit design requiring 2 button combinations between 3 buttons to determine your spell cast. (XX, XY, XA, YY, YX, YA, AA, AX, AY). They offer a lot of utility, have comparable sustained damage and a decent kit to kite once you get used to switching spells on the fly, and unlock a shield that blocks damage after 16-20 seconds of being untouched. Wizard has essentially no burst but plenty of ways to dish out damage over time.

Archer is in my opinion the easiest to use with high burst damage from his bombs, low sustained damage, and a nice roll dodge; just imagine playing a MMO and mobbing monsters.

Valkyrie like I mentioned earlier has a ridiculously power strong attack which offers high amounts of sustained damage; the tradeoff is he's vulnerable to getting hit if he just spams the attack. The Valkyrie unlocks a powerful perk which makes him very durable at low health.

The leveling and gold system definitely seems a bit bland. You can buy relics which are temporary perks you can use with potions and new gear but the gear is purely aesthetic. I do find it interesting that you "level up" by unlocking achievements (eg. killing 10,000 monsters, breaking 500 props, etc) which will give you various benefits. It seems kind of silly that you unlock some perks for dying. Some perks have 3 tiers, Bronze Silver and Gold. Each is just a slight upgrade over the previous perk. The time it takes max out all the perks is at least 30 hours on a single class.

I would estimate the average playtime will be around 20-40 hours for a person who enjoys this game. After 40 hours of personal gametime, I would say the game is definitely better played with friends. Though public rooms are available, the experience is nowhere as fun. My biggest concern is that the game will lose replayability once you become better at it and master every level on Unfair difficulty since there is a limited amount of actual content (you can speed run through everything on Easy in probably 2 to 4 hours).

Overall, I would give this game a 7 out of 10. I would say the game's good, but not great, and very fun while chatting with friends over voip.

Fun top-down game with many ways to complete heists.
I enjoyed co-oping as well as solo speedrunning!