Recent reviews by HELLruler

Amazing mystery game, you will be glued to the screen until you finish it!

Simple and short game, it's definitely weird to play with the bump-to-attack system (also avoiding hitting enemies head-on)

It serves as a decent start to the Ys series, there is some amount of lore to introduce the world and many hidden details that you will need a guide if you want to 100% it (you won't be missing anything important though if you don't want to go for it)

It shows its age, but if you grab it on a discount, it's definitely worth playing!

Impressive game! This is definitely an evolution in game design from Atlus and I hope they keep it moving forward!

In summary, this game is like Persona, but with a mature story that doesn't fall flat in the end, a flexible class system that forces you to vary your strategy, and a lenient time limit that doesn't force you to read a guide and optimize your dialogue choices

Definitely a masterpiece that JRPG fans will love!

I definitely wasn't expecting to give this game a thumbs up

Both Kiwami 1 and 2 are remakes of older games and they improved the gameplay a lot. Sadly, we didn't get the same treatment here, just better graphics
It's pretty clear from the first few minutes that this game was made a long time ago, and it's even baffling that it's this bad for a PS3 game (well, the PS3 had many games of dubious quality anyway)

Some fights are terrible, some are completely easy, you spend so much time taking care of the kids that I'm pretty sure Persona took some lessons from this game to make their story setups so long
But if you push through the all the bad, you will find a game that has a lot of good things to offer, especially the main story - it is a huge improvement from 1 and 2

Definitely a hidden gem!

The story and the combat are very simple at first. As you progress through the game, you learn its intricacies like abusing the assist mechanic, what skills to pick, how to make the best out of your team since you lose some characters

You will need two playthroughs to get the whole context of the story, and honestly, after finishing the game for the first time, you will want to play it again to understand what's going on!

Regarding the DLC, I recommend the mission pack. You might need to do some extra missions to grind or find out who is the traitor (it's random), so having those extra missions surely will add to your possibilities

I don't even know where to begin this review...
Just want to let you know that I really like the Yakuza series, played some of the games back in the day, and I'm revisiting all of them to refresh my memory for Infinite Wealth

So, steam only allows us to give thumbs up or thumbs down, so I'm going with the negative cause I wouldn't want anyone to waste their time playing this unless they really want to

You are here most likely because you finished the first game, which is incredibly bad. Yakuza 2 improved a lot of good things from 1 - the combat is better, Kiryu starts the game powerful, the skill system is pretty good, there's another ton of stuff to do

So why am I giving a negative review? At this point, I believe most people will only visit the older games for the story, cause they can access better versions of the extra content in later games. And the story is bad
The writer managed to put a plot twist in every single cutscene of the game, and I'm not even joking. If you've played Yakuza 0, you've seen how a well-done plot twist can make the story 100x times more interesting
But if you overdo it, you end up with a joke story

To finish this review, I just want to say that if you are here for the story, save your money and time, read a summary and move on
If you want to give it a try, good luck, you've been warned, I guess

This game is good, but the problem is that the company decided to do some sort of "Live Service" for a single-player game. If that sounds stupid, it's because it is. You could also call that "Early Access with full price tag"

I'm really happy that the dev team has been pushing fixes to bugs, but every week or so we get big changes to the game - which were necessary and makes me question if this game was really tested before release

If you are considering buying it, what I can suggest is to either wait for a sale or wait a couple of years when the "Live Service" early access is done so you can have the full experience

With a heavy heart, I'm not recommending this game

To be fair, I expected more from the puzzles. They are interesting and creative, every area gives you new mechanics to play with and they all integrate well, but most of them are rather simple

There are usually a couple of steps to solve the puzzles, and you normally tackle them separately, which is why the game is easy
There are more complex ones, where you have to plan everything before executing, the ones that will make you stare at the screen for a long time, but they are few and far between

First of all, one thing that should be clear for anyone interested in this game is that it is an RPG first and a life sim second. A lot of content is gated behind progressing through the story, which means going out of town and killing monsters. Don't expect to play "Japanese Stardew Valley"

With that out of the way, Rune Factory 4 is a solid game for today's standards considering how old it is + coming from handheld console.

Combat is very simple, but you have a decent variety of weapons, skills and magic. You are locked during animations, and that can be frustrating for some weapons, but it works fine with some practice. Levels don't mean much, your gear stats will decide if you can tackle an area or not.

Which leads us to crafting: in its most basic form, you gather resources, press the OK button a few times and your item is ready. But what the game doesn't tell you is that, at some point, the level of the ingredients start to matter since there are breakpoints that will massively increase the stats of your gear. I highly recommend that you search for a crafting guide, cause the game will get very difficult at times and it expects you to know how to take advantage of the crafting mechanics!

Moving out of the action, the game also has a couple of life sim - you can grow crops, mine, fish, make friends, marry and have children, and tame monsters. None of those systems are really amazing, and it's such a shame that this game could be so much more if those activities got the same love that combat did. I'm not saying that they are bad, but mining and fishing could be a lot more interesting if they had more mechanics like farming does.

Overall, the game is fun and you can have a nice and mostly stress-free time with it. It's a shame that at some point, the story ends and the life sim part doesn't really hold itself well enough to keep me invested for longer like Stardew Valley.

Also, I'm fully aware that I haven't finished the game because of an issue with a town event. Spoiler alert: after you beat the "final boss", you have to trigger a town event to start Act 3, but town events trigger randomly, and I didn't have the patience to wait for a trigger + restart until I get the right one.

Nioh 2 improved a lot of the good things about Nioh 1: better combat, yokai form, skill trees are easier to understand. But it failed to create a fun game.

Yokai enemies now have a ton of health, and you have to keep breaking their stamina to deal damage. It sounded like a good idea at first, but then you realize those enemies are everywhere and you are wasting your time fighting the same gorilla yokai over and over again (and hopefully you don't die and have to run all the way back to where you were, fighting those enemies again)

Level design also took a big hit. Nioh 1's levels were somehow maze-like, there was some going around, finding the right item, and mastering the level. Nioh 2 doesn't go that far, sadly: levels allow little exploration, the "mastering the level" is gone, and there is no reward for going out of your way to check a side track

If you have never played Nioh, I will strongly recommend 2. But if you want a good Nioh game, then you always have Nioh 1 for that.