Recent reviews by kteno

I never thought I’d ever see the day where I’d be giving a negative review to a From Software release.

Before you think that I’m just another scrub that needs to git gud; I’ve 100%’d every single Souls type game (including Elden Ring) and every single Armored Core game, and have done multiple speedruns of Dark Souls 1 and 3, Sekiro, Armored Core: Last Raven, Armored Core: For Answer, and Armored Core 6. I have over 700 hours on Elden Ring between all platforms. I know my ♥♥♥♥ when it comes to these games.

I’ve seen Fromsoft at their best, so I can see that Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is far from it.

TLDR: Unless you love using broken gameplay systems that are antithetical to the souls experience, don’t bother getting this DLC, not even on sale.


What makes their Souls games so great is the mechanically tight one-on-one combat and world design. ER:SotE does retain the strong visual aspect of world and enemy design, but the layout and traversal of the Land of Shadow feels generic at best, and the good boss fights aren’t present at all. Sure, the new bosses and areas look cool, but that’s about it. It feels like Fromsoft increased the difficulty just for the sake of making it hard, not to provide any meaningful challenge.

Every major boss has:
- Input reading on an unfair level, even above that of the base game, and especially worse than other recent releases. Bosses have always had input reading, but it’s so strong in this game that it feels like the game is working against you, not that an enemy is reacting to you.
- Extremely poor telegraphs that are practically unreadable on any first attempt. Previously, Fromsoft bosses were almost universally designed in a way that allowed you to understand what they were doing at nearly all times, while also being challenging. These new bosses are all but impossible to kill first try, unless you use broken systems like bleed or mimic tears. Many moves also have untelegraphed AOE follow-ups that practically guarantee you will die no matter what if you don’t know the dodge timings.
- Extremely high movement speed that break the camera (even though it’s been broken for many years). About once a minute, the boss will jump around you and cause the camera to do a 360, making you miss your attack, while they still hit with their perfect tracking. "Not using lockon" isn't a solution for this either, that's not how these games are designed. But regardless, if you were to not use the lockon in these instances, the bosses would effectively teleport behind you and you'd need to spin the camera around to find them, during which you will likely die because they always do something to chain or stun you afterwards.

These bosses are just not fun to fight, unless you use spirit ashes or summons, which ruin the experience that Fromsoft bosses were made for and turn them into trivial cakewalks. These bosses are practically designed around summons, but above that, Fromsoft bosses categorically are designed to be fought one-on-one. So, these bosses come from an extremely conflicted design methodology, and end up being just plain unfun. Your choice with bosses is to have an unfair, unreadable, and overpunishing slog, or a hack-and-slash snoozefest.
I know I opened with this same statement, but I never thought I’d see the day where I fought a boss that is worse than Bed of Chaos. That’s how bad some of these bosses are. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ abysmal and Fromsoft should be ashamed.

The “leveling” system feels tacked on and is extremely intrusive. Instead of using souls, er, runes to level up your character, instead you gather Scadutree fragments from around the world, then use those fragments to increase your damage output and negation in a completely linear fashion. This removes any meaningful choice that the RPG elements used to function as, and instead just makes finding these fragments a flat requirement for any boss fight. Your character level does not mean ♥♥♥♥ besides equip requirements, so runes are really only used to purchase things like titanite shards, er, smithing stones.
But. The game gives you countless smithing stones, gloveworts, and miscellaneous consumables everywhere in the world, so runes are practically worthless. And when your rewards for exploring the world are worthless, the world feels empty and meaningless to explore.

Going through the Shadow Lands is just a fancy sightseeing tour, with the occasional mandatory stop for Scadutree fragments to let you continue your tour.


I expected better of From Software.


3/10

Witch on the Holy Night is the most animated non-animated visual novel I've read. Despite having a standard amount of sprites, backgrounds and visual effects, every scene has a strong sense of space and movement in how all of these elements are utilized. The voice acting is absolutely amazing, and when combined with how fluid the rest of the presentation is, along with the music and sound effects, reading this VN can sometimes feel like watching a movie with some extra subtitles.

Besides the presentation, the story and characters are interesting and kept me wanting to learn more, though I would say that a lot of stuff does end up feeling surface-level in how much it all gets explained. While prior knowledge of Type Moon works isn’t required, knowing some basics on the world can help make understanding this games story and setting a bit easier. (I would however recommend watching The Garden of Sinners movies afterwards due to a continuing character arc.)

The story itself is rather straightforward and can be predictable at times, and it doesn’t do anything too noteworthy. Rather than being in the overarching narrative, the real meat of the story is in the interactions between the cast of characters. Don’t expect a structured narrative like Fate Stay Night when going in, or you’ll just be disappointed waiting for stuff to happen.

The game follows a linear structure, with additional side-stories occasionally opening up between chapters. A lot of these chapters can feel like unnecessary filler to pad playtime, but I found them to be enjoyable since I was already invested in the story. It’s just worth noting that they may not land as well for you, so you may expect to get a shorter total playtime for the money spent.

While not the best at providing a narrative, Witch on the Holy Night does have a nearly unparalleled presentation that is almost enough of a reason to play it by itself. For that reason, combined with the strong characters, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in visual novels.

8/10

Armored Core 6 is unsurprisingly amazing given the quality of From Softwares recent titles, but it doesn't feel much like Armored Core at all - and that's a good thing.

I love For Answer (4th gen) and Last Raven (3rd gen), and I started the series with the original, playing everything in order. Every game has made notable changes to the formula, but 6 beats them all by a mile.

If you enjoyed any of From Softwares recent titles then you'll most likely enjoy AC6. But know that it has one of the sharpest difficulty curves of their entire catalog, and I'm saying that as someone who has played every single one of their games, excluding the Kings Field series and older one-offs.

AC6 stands beside Sekiro in having what I would call the best combat in modern gaming. As is standard with Armored Core, you get a massive amount of freedom in how you want to play, even moreso than games in the Dark Souls style. The new game engine pushes this freedom to its limit and lets you take full advantage of every system in the game, finally realizing the dream that was built by the older gens.

My only complaint with the game is the stagger system. Think Poise from DS, but made to be the focus of nearly every encounter. It's an alright system, but I feel like too much emphasis is put on it over other aspects of combat. Despite this, the combat does still feel responsive, fluid and satisfying.

9/10

I beat the base game on PS4 back when it came out, so my time on Steam is misleading.

Some people say that this game covers the first quarter or even the first third of the original game, but it's more like the first 10% at most. There is an absolutely absurd amount of filler added into this game that makes it a chore to go through. I don't really like the changes to the story, but I'd be fine with them if the rest of the game wasn't just slow walking and worthless sidequests. The combat can be enjoyable, but gets boring quickly if you start doing any side content.

In my eyes, the real reason to play this game is seeing the cast in modern graphics with voice acting and more time for development. The early chapter that has you spending time with the secondary members of the team was really nice and is the highlight of the game (in the context of the original). After that, it's nice to see everything that was done with the main cast, but it does not justify a $70 price tag, or even $60 without the Intergrade addition.

If you're a big fan of FF7 like I am, then it'd be worth getting the game on sale, especially with the next game coming to PC soon. However, this would be a very poor choice for a first experience of the FF7 world. Even though the original looks very dated, it still holds up surprisingly well, so go play that first and then come back and consider the remake.

5/10

Persona 5 Tactica is one of the better Persona spinoffs, but it's still a Persona spinoff so all you can expect is a good-looking persona skin put onto another game.

The game can be fun to play, but has very little depth to it. Even on the highest difficulty, a significant number of missions are insultingly easy, while the rest are hard only because of the RNG in enemy pathing and damage numbers.
As you would expect, the characters are all just caricatures of their P5 counterparts, and the story is just an excuse to set up the gameplay.

I got roughly halfway through the second of three acts before just getting bored and giving up. Once you've done the first half of the first act, the only thing you have yet to experience are boss battles. Other than those fights, the interesting part of the game ends at the 5 hour mark.

If you're a fan of Persona 5, then it may be worth checking this out on a deep sale, but otherwise just go play better tactics games.

4/10

I wanted to like this game, I really did. FF7 and 9 are some of my favorite games of all time, so I went into 8 thinking it would also be amazing. It had to be, right? It came out between two other classics I loved, everyone I've talked to has said it's amazing, and I'm also a big fan of the FF8 class that got added into FF14.

But no. This is one of the worst games I have ever played. I was absolutely shocked at how unenjoyable the game was.

I know this is a very subjective statement, but I found every character in the main cast to be a boring cardboard cutout emulation of the archetypes from earlier games. I say this having only completed less than a quarter of the game, but if none of the characters are interesting or likable after 10 hours, something is wrong. The story itself was serviceable, but very hard to follow because of how disconnected the world felt - both between regions and individual screens.
8 is also the first FF game where I needed to consult walkthroughs to proceed. It's way too challenging to tell where you're supposed to go next and what parts of the environment are interactable.

The new combat systems, Junction and GF, are extremely confusing and counter intuitive. They feel like systems created for the sake of complexity, while also over simplifying party compositions. You could use materia and skills in 7 and 9 to make characters fill certain roles, but it always felt purposeful, unlike in 8.
Any character can draw any ability from an enemy, so you can easily make everyone into a jack of all trades with zero downsides. Want someone to be a healer? Just draw some heals and cleanses from enemies. Want them to deal damage? Add some elemental spells. Want them to be a tank? Slot in defensive abilities and GFs alongside your healing and damaging spells. As far as I know, there is zero downside to doing this on every character - besides the time it takes to draw spells.
At least materia took time to level, and you really had to work to get to the point where everyone could simultaneously fill every role.

The remaster itself is also just ugly. I'm not a big fan of how the original looked either, but this version is just unpleasant to look at a lot of the time.

If you're a big fan of Final Fantasy then it's probably worth the time and money to try the game just to experience it, but otherwise just don't bother. Go play 7 and 9.

2/10

I do strongly recommend this game, especially at its price point, but there's a few practically game-breaking bugs I've ran into that may hinder your experience.

The keybind mapping breaks consistently, and often resets to the (terrible) default controls on restart. Additionally, when in the pause menu, occasionally a second pause menu can open, which you cannot interact with. The only way to fix this from my experience is by restarting the game - which can also trigger the keybind bugs. These two bugs often loop into eachother and can make it very hard to just get to playing the game.

Besides those two major problems, the game is actually amazing and I was surprised with how good the gameplay is. The movement and exploration are the core of the game, and they complement eachother very strongly. Throughout the entire game, just moving around always feels satisfying, and you can pull off surprising feats of traversal with just the basic tools. The game is a masterful combination of Super Mario 64 and Metroid Prime.

Oh, and Sybil is pretty neat too.

8/10

Signalis is my favorite game of all time. I’ve completed countless games all across many genres, but nothing has stood out to me quite like this this one. Because of how important to me, I've decided to finally sit down and write a proper review of the game after my third replay.

If you’re even slightly interested from the store listing, then just go buy it right now.
Signalis is best experienced blind, so I’d advise against reading reviews. As such, I’m going to be providing as little information as possible - just enough to substantiate my recommendation.

The puzzles are very diegetic, and while sometimes convoluted, exist as a part of the world. Their challenge, engagement levels, and overall design have raised the bar for the entire genre. Similarly, the tutorials are all contextualized as being in-world documents, posters and such. You also learn about the world as someone existing in it, not as a player just reading a list of documents.
This is all to say that the worldbuilding is done amazingly, and despite the graphics and heavy gameplay elements, it’s very easy to get immersed in the world.

The gameplay itself is simple and easy to understand, but has a high skill ceiling and strong learning curve that lends itself to replays very well. Additionally, there are multiple endings and secrets to find after completing your first playthrough. While having modern quality of life standards, the game feels a lot like the retro games it (successfully) emulates - to the point where I recommend prepping a pen and paper for notes while playing.

A lot of the story is told alongside the worldbuilding, so it can be a bit of a challenge to piece together and fully understand. Despite that, a strong narrative is still provided and it does more than just motivate you to reach the end.

Signalis has become one of the only games I’ve actually committed to replaying on a regular basis. If you like the sound of anything in this review, I encourage you again to give Signalis a try. The developers from Rose Engine have created a distinct and amazing experience you do not want to miss.

10/10

I highly recommend this game, but it may not be for everyone, even those who enjoy the genre. If you're interested in the store description at all, then it's definitely worth checking out.
I'm going to highlight some of the things that people might dislike in order to help you make a more informed decision.

Crow Country is rather short, maybe too short for the price tag - I completed it in just over 6 hours while thoroughly exploring and backtracking. However it does offer strong replay value, with many hidden secrets, a scoring system, and new items and challenges that get unlocked upon beating the game. I'm definitely going to go back in for more.

The real charm of the game is the graphics and the overall presentation. I grew up in the Gamecube/PS2 era so I dont have any nostalgia for this style of graphics, but regardless it still evoked that classic, retro feel for me.
Every room is meticulously crafted to have a specific mood and feel to it, and the rooms change as you progress through the game.

The important parts of the story are directly told to the player, but there's tons of extra documents scattered throughout the park that you can look for that help to flesh out the characters and the history of the park. In my thorough search, I missed 4 of the 15 secret items, so there's definitely a good challenge in finding everything.

The puzzles and key item progression are all rather straightforwards. Serviceable, to where anyone could solve them given enough time, but left me wanting a bit more of a challenge, but I did still enjoy them all.
There's also an in-game hint counter that you can use up to 10 times in case you get stuck or lost. I ended up using it twice myself, but only to confirm that I was looking in the right spots. You can definitely complete the game without using them once, so I see them as a good accessibility option.

There is one "puzzle" I want to mention specifically though. While optional for a weapon upgrade, the solution is purely brute force, *and* contradictory to the clues given. For anyone wanting to know what it is going into it, the "puzzle" is in the Mush Room, and the "solution" is to eat every mushroom on the table and healing through the poison ones, instead of finding the safe ones. There are interactables in the room that would seem like hints, but they're all entirely irrelevant. I'm hesitant to call this setpiece a bad inclusion, but it is something I would say needed more work.

(Since release, a "hard" difficulty has been added. I have yet to replay the game with it, so I'm going to leave my original thoughts about the games difficulty.)
The combat is a bit too easy, and most of my healing was from environmental damage. I also finished the game with nearly capped resources when fighting my last enemies, and the only times I went below "caution" health was in the puzzle mentioned above. Granted, I explored a lot, but I never felt like I was really needing to manage resources whatsoever. The lack of a difficulty slider, besides "enemies" and "no enemies", is also something to make note of if you want a challenge. The enemies can be strafed around with no challenge at all, at least when using modern movement. The tank controls, while significantly slower, are probably the best way to play the game.

I don't find myself getting scared easily, and Crow Country was no exception. There were a few times I was naturally jumpscared, but the extent of the horror was in exploration and finding new enemies.

Despite all of the games flaws, it was an amazing experience, and I ended up finishing in one long sitting. I'll definitely be looking forwards to future releases from SFB Games.

9/10