Recent reviews by sibladeko

After coming off the diamond in the rough that is Refrain, it's unfortunate to see the sequel fail on so many levels. If you can only play one of the two, go play Refrain. I cannot recommend this game to anyone who hasn't played the first one and absolutely adored it, faults and all, and EVEN IF you have, I feel it is impossible to stop comparing all the shortcomings this game has with the first one constantly. If you come into this game with no prior attachments there is very little for you here, go play EO3 remake or something.

I'll start with this statement, heard from the friend who first recommended me Refrain while struggling in the middle of Galleria, that I agree with 100%. Precisely because this was a sequel to one of the best games I have ever played, I gave it way more patience than it deserved. The format is the same as Refrain, dungeon crawler with Nippon Ichi flair. You do a little dungeon crawling, you get a story segment and proceed the story, you do some more dungeon crawling, you advance more plot. The story progression system should be familiar with anyone who played Disgaea.
However, gone are the different worlds of the labyrinth, the entire first half takes place in the same dungeon. This means very little variation in well, everything. The music stays the same, the backgrounds stay the same, the enemies stay the same, the biggest variation is literally three places called red yellow and blue (you'll remember red a lot because you'll be stuck there grinding for an absurdly long time.) It's like they ran out of budget to do anything more. It makes sense in the context of the story, but it also makes the dungeon exploration experience EXTREMELY dull. Oh yeah, remember all those red sigils that told stories in the first game? They mean almost nothing in this one. There's almost no in-dungeon interaction/stories either, meaning the story is extremely separated from what you are doing in dungeon, which is a whole lot of fetching. The first dungeon in Refrain has a larger cast than all the dungeons put together in Galleria, that is how little interaction there is. No Lilliputians to squash or free, no trolls to hide from in caves, no triple tower power trifecta to navigate through, just fetching ♥♥♥♥ from the same extremely vapid locations.
And this is BEFORE we get to the apartments. Apartments and by extension cathedral feel like they got tired of actual level design and left it up to chatGPT, because that's what these so-called "rogue-lite" randomized dungeon sections are, extremely soulless flavorless instant dungeons, just add mana. 126 floors of apartments! 3651 floors of cathedral! Try to find elevators to speed up your progress! It feels like a sales scam to say it with a straight face. Also all these ♥♥♥♥♥♥ dungeons actually take EXTREMELY long to go through. By the time you get to apartments we're talking maybe 50-60 hours of the first dungeons and then your experience in apartments can vary wildly with how lucky you get, but like at this point when you finally escape apartments maybe 80 hours and you're still barely halfway through this grindfest. In conclusion the level design is a huge downgrade, it feels like they really wanted to separate the story and dungeon experience for some reason rather than combining it like Refrain did, and the game flow suffers terribly for it.

Now this might all be (somewhat) forgivable if the story was on the level of Refrain. But they really drop the ball on this one too. It's hard to explain without spoiling just how underwhelming Galleria's story is, so I'll make some vague comparisons once again. Galleria's story is at its best when you don't know what is going on. That means the experience is most tolerable in the first half. The big twist a la Refrain really doesn't help you understand any more of the bigger picture, the game forces you through another 40 hours or so of fetch quests for that, and despite how long you're stuck dungeoning the entire second half of the actual narrative is a condensed rushed mess. I kept hanging on waiting for the eventual payoff and was met with emptiness. With no clear villain or even conflict there's a sense of "that's it?" And the post-game story and final resolution? You know how post-game Refrain combined grueling difficulty (for some) with an emotional roller-coaster and left a lot of people mentally exhausted at the end? Rather than mental exhaustion, there's an even bigger feeling of nothing at the end of Galleria. Nothingburger. No attachment to anything that is happening anymore. Like nothing mattered. Truly shoot the shaggy dog level. There are some political lesbians who try to compare the main platonic relationship to Refrain's main relationship as having similar narrative weight, and it's like did we play the same game? I was absolutely emotionally absent and checked out.

Finally we come to one of the positives in comparison to Refrain, the actual battle systems and combat. I liked the new systems, I used the new reinforcements, I liked the new classes a lot. There was new QoL. I liked how instead of a max of 8 skills of inheritance they had skill point values now and a soft cap of skill points so you had a lot more variety of builds without falling into "learn every skill" endgame. There were a lot of funny builds too (stun cheese notwithstanding) that you could do, I never felt I needed to do stun spam to be honest at any point in the game. However, one huge oversight was the lack of saved skill templates. Because your max amount of skills could now border 20 or so, every time you hit max level and transmigrated you had to reselect all your skills one by one again. Every. Single. Time. Multiply this by like 15-30 puppets and you can see that this becomes a huge time waster. Another friend who was going through the game at the same time actually just stopped rebirthing his characters because of how long this process of rechoosing skills took. Also all the skill variety became moot late game, it became purely about weapon synthesis. You slapped some cannons or whatever high base ATK white weapons you found onto your legendary weapon with lots of synth slots and you could roll over the final orb FOE (who was harder than the post-game final boss btw) at all floors. Still, it seems a bit harsh to downplay how much fun the gameplay was in the context of suffering in every other aspect of the game; it's definitely a big part of the reason I was able to get through the game.

In conclusion, play Refrain first. If Refrain was great, but you got tired or couldn't get through post-game, don't bother with Galleria. If you loved Refrain (and Witch) so much that you're willing to grasp at any straws related to the universe and sit on discord discussing lore, maybe give Galleria a shot and end up lying to yourself that the game wasn't that bad after you manage to slog through it. I know it took me a while to really flesh out every issue I had with the experience. A quintessential "200 hours played, does not recommend" review.

My time is inflated cause I left the game on, chop around 8-9 hours off.

I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I'll agree with the review that the game makes you feel smarter than you really are.
Once you're done with all the story segments and you're just flip switching the groups of nationalities it feels sort of like you're just rotating pieces until they fit.
I understand why it was done and at the same time wonder if there couldn't have been a better way.
Still liked it overall, but if you're frugal, not sure if I'd recommend full price.
Luckily you can tell pretty quickly (before 2 hours) if you'll get easily frustrated or if you can't put it down, so use that as a refund benchmark.

3v3 Windjammers combined with Battlerite.
It used to have a little too much fighting compared to air hockey but now the air hockey is back thanks to the latest patch. Feels extremely generous with its free currency in that it doesn't cap per day/week (looking at you, Smash Legends and Gundam Evolution and Battlerite and Multiversus and tons of other games) so I honestly wonder how they make money.

8ing are the masters of kusoge. Lopsided matchup central. It do be fun af though.

Man only plays Dragalia Lost, compares everything to Dragalia Lost. (RIP)

Jokes aside, this game is a weird mishmash of stolen setpieces and design ideas from half a dozen other games I've played. The initial impression of a Diablo-like MMO is completely wrong, and if that's what you are looking for, look elsewhere. Rather, there is Diablo-like content you can do (Chaos Gate), there is Monster Hunter-like content you can do (Guardian Raid), and there is normal instanced MMO dungeon setpiece content you can do (Abyss Dungeon). You do all three in varying amounts at end game, plus an unhealthy amount of lifting and moving boxes and Wind Waker downtime sailing, and that's Lost Ark.

After the initial couple weeks of intense activity, once you hit tier 3 you'll settle down into a daily pattern of failing hones and doing dailies on alts while incrementally making progress, If you are someone who constantly needs to be ahead you can pour real money into the game at this point to get more attempts at becoming incrementally stronger, but that's not really compelling motivation for someone like me who is f2pbtw. Thankfully, I really like this game's PVP, any time I didn't feel like progressing or failing percents, I'd just jump into it. It's probably half the reason if not more that I continue to play this game.

So in the end, it's sort of a hard sell. I feel like there's enough stolen ideas and cool things that at least SOME of them will appeal to anyone, but sticking around to experience the whole package for hundreds of hours? (this game is 100% an MMO after all) Maybe give it a try, and if you hit tier 1 and don't like what you see, quit then.

Kusoge in TCG form.

When I last played Yugioh, people used Gemini Elves and Summoned Skulls, the game felt incredibly limited and also nothing like the TV show, and I thought the game was doomed to obscurity vs something like Magic.

Fast forward to 2022, Yugioh is the most popular TCG in Japan, third most popular in the US, and still going strong. So I figured, why not dive past the jokes about FTKs/OTKs/playing solitaire/I PLAY POT OF GREED and really revisit the game for research's sake (and I love opening ♥♥♥♥ for free)

Just like Magic's biggest weakness will always be lands, Hearthstone/Shadowverse's playpoint system inherently will be turn order, Weiss's will be climaxes, Yugioh's biggest issue is its "one normal summon a turn" clause. This rule holds a vice-like grip on modern Yugioh card design, to be remotely playable, much less relevant, your archtype needs to be able to aggressively get around this rule by: 1. Special summoning as many monsters as you can per turn 2. Drawing cards to keep this up. This has the effect of loading almost all of Yugioh's advanced gameplay into the cards themselves; two pages of text per card is not an exaggeration. It also effectively means that a draft variant of Yugioh is impossible, as no one wants to normal summon the highest attack monster they have and then just attack (regressing to what I thought the game was all about many years ago.)

The side effect of this type of card design is that each turn is absurdly loaded with reams of card text going off. Aggro, combo, and control don't really exist as you'd think of them, everyone is combo of some type, whether they are using their engines to put up unbreakable board states or to break said board states or to kill you in one turn. It's for this reason that hand traps even exist, the sheer advantage of going first and "doing your thing" unhindered (even w/o attacking) is still extremely lopsided to the point that Yugioh needs multiple cards that can say "no" just by being present in your hand. (think Force of Will is OP?)

Speaking of player interaction, I find the solitare joke a little misguided. While a lot of games do end on the first turn, multiples lines of play/extenders and baiting hand/normals traps makes high level Yugioh play really interesting to me, even if it is inherently cursed. It's like watching two players hurriedly build up a house of cards and also trying to find the weakspots that sends their opponent's crashing down. There's arguably way more player interaction in Yugioh than something like Weiss, a third of your deck is usually negates, after all.

The final issue with this game is remembering the absurd amount of specific rules that arise from having a game where the rules are mainly written on the cards. Or in short, how the ♥♥♥♥ do you rocket scientists play this game offline? I remember having to go over "properly summoned" for the purposes of special summoning from the GY, which is a board state you and your opponent would normally need to remember for EACH MONSTER in the GY, which strikes me as insane. Let's not go over "inherently summoned." ♥♥♥♥ like Trigger effects vs Quick effects and staring at why Electrumite and Astrograph Sorceror work the way they do (so Sorceror literally procs from himself dying) and other interactions is a nightmare. Instead of the stack you have the Chain Link system which is like the stack except with a ton of exceptions everywhere. I've never seen a game where you can misplay by the mechanics at so many points per sequence.

In the end, I find this game really interesting, but it's interesting in a trainwreck way. I can't call it good, and I think Konami's attempts to remake the game really shows they know the game is just too damn old and built on a cursed foundation.

Disclaimer: I finished the tutorial (reached Plat) in a day using Sky Strikers, before that I literally just played single player learning about effects.

In the year 2022...almost one year later, a little bird told me that they fixed the game! So my friends and I decided to hop back in and see...and honestly, they did a decent job. The biggest thing is it's easy to get level 10 on a character now. All those hours of farming pity chests to get a crumb of frags or character roads to get a fraction of a character's level requirements, that's all gone. Instead, in-game money just buys your way to level 10, buys skill levels, buys new characters. Sure, skill level 1 vs 5 is expensive, but it's way better than the cursed state it was before where there was almost always a lopsided level difference.
New mode shakes up the chaotic campiness of dominion, allowing for skilled 1v1 engagements quite a lot of the time in lanes, allowing for quite a bit of outplay. New chars sort of obsolete the old chars, but they are balancing frequently it seems.
All in all, not a bad time to try out the game, now that it (to use a trite saying) "respects your time" more.

It's a good game for your first 3D fighter. If you're not used to them 3D is about turn taking, which is why you get angry when someone does some headass ♥♥♥♥ during your turn. But that's Tekken. In 2D if you got knocked down you might have already lost, but in Tekken you can always steal your turn back. I would never buy the DLC full price, wait for the somewhat frequent sales. And if you get serious, buy DLC just to train against certain characters, you will need it.

So let's get this out of the way first, I'm sort of known for playing bad fighting games. I bought this on a whim when I honestly had no reason to buy it, I really enjoy BBTag right now, I'm aware of Nicalis's controversy with Pixel etc., I have no investment in any of the crossover franchises and to be frank the game looks quite ugly. It looked ugly at WNF when it was shown off in development and it looks ugly now. Some of the animations are great (Lina's are not) but there's no filters or anti-aliasing on anything and the jaggies are jarring.

With all that being said...the game is a surprisingly decent footsies-based fighter. You cannot block in the air. Jumps have quite a bit of startup, landing has quite a bit of recovery. Only one character has a real airdash. There are a lot of unsafe moves on block. Unlike BBTag, the scramble is not so prevalent in this game, it's quite deliberate. Losing feels very much your fault, did you mash while negative and get counterhit? Did you jump and get meatied or anti aired? Did you whiff jump normals and suffer landing recovery? Did you have your DP on wakeup blocked? The damage is extremely high in this game, and I'm saying this coming from BBTag, it makes me wonder if 3/5 would be a better default. You mash wrong twice you can conceivably die. A jab punish is devastating, better starters is 50%-80% territory. Meter is freely given and ex move bnbs are more common than meterless.

All in all, the game has a surprisingly solid foundation and is deceptively difficult to play well. I'm of the opinion that the simplified control scheme actually complicates quite a few things, there's so many moves that are directional command multiple button presses that it's really easy to get confused when coming from traditional fighters. "Man this should just be 236C" passes my mind a lot.

There are also quite a few bugs to iron out at the moment. Anyway, if a more deliberate pace of fighter isn't your bag, I'd wait for a larger sale or pass it up. But if you enjoyed something like say Street Fighter or even Aquapazza, this'll probably be up your alley.

I'm a second generation Taiwanese, so I never lived in Taiwan, only visited, only heard about the martial law period and could never really connect on a deep level with my parents (my dad protests outside the UN from time to time.)
That being said, I don't want to start with the cliche "If you're Taiwanese, this game will definitely hit some emotional points!" but a lot of things hit very close to home.
Like knowing the song in the piano room by heart w/o knowing the name because it was played constantly in your house.
Or the familiar angry muffled voices of a couple arguing in Taiwanese...

Anyway, you don't have to be Taiwanese to enjoy this game, it is a very powerful story and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a few hours of good storytelling. It changes from horror to surreal midway through so don't expect a nonstop scare ride, but the balance of horror and philosophical reflection it does is excellent.

Edit: In regards to the recent review bombs from Chinese people mad about Devotion, I ask those of you who played Detention and feel "betrayed" by the developer...

You offer us a new dictatorship to replace the old one and you wonder why we don't welcome you with open arms? Way to miss the global themes of this game.