Recent reviews by Nahoy Guhoy

Thank god this game is good, I was worried after Team Sonic Racing. I still think Racing Transformed is better, though; I don't find this game's "Crossworld" gimmick as fun, the roster selection is much less varied and interesting, the DLC characters not having voices sucks, the single player is SIGNIFICANTLY less fun, plus the new trick system is way less skill based than Transformed, I mean there's no skill involved at all to it anymore. But again, the game is still really fun, kicks the ♥♥♥♥ out of Mario Kart World, and it's so easily moddable that my main has become the Red M&M because Aiai isn't in the game yet.

I wouldn't recommend this version over emulating the SNES or GBA versions, but Final Fantasy V is still really fun no matter the version. The quality of life features that Pixel Remaster has (better optimize, faster ability/job switching, diagonal movement, seeing the Berserker's ATB gauge, Sword Dance being usable from the back row, among other random things) are kinda cancelled out by some annoying things about it (the general ATB gauge change that means you get potshot at the start of every battle before getting Hermes Sandals, cursor memory being bugged with the Healing Staff that makes party members target other party members, the presentation overall not being as good). Plus, not having access to emulator speedup means replaying the game is significantly slower than emulating it. But y'know, it's still a fun game despite all that.

This is the best game in the series (gameplay-wise) and one of my personal favorite games of all time. So far there have been no bugs or performance issues that I've encountered, playing on 2560x1440 at 120fps, and everything works exactly how it should. The only changes I've seen so far is that a bunch of sound effects have been changed, which isn't bad so much as it is weird that they'd bother, and that there's an option for randomized battle music made of songs from other games in the series. And there's a LOT of songs, so you'll be playing for a while before you hear any repeats.

But yeah, heavily recommend to buy if you love action RPGs or want a multiplayer game to play. I will warn people that the first couple hours aren't great, because you're stuck in "tutorial mode" where you have lame versions of characters to play as and the story is very trope-y, but it's all for a purpose and the game doesn't make you wait too long to get to the fun parts.

I'm gonna pull a Running Shine here and start off by saying the amount of effort poured into this game really can't be understated. Just over the past 3-4 years, Ackk has spent so many man hours making this huge update to this already big game. It couldn't have been easy, for sure, and I'd never want to ♥♥♥♥ on developers for really trying their hardest to make their game better. And I can definitely say that a non-insignificant part of me not enjoying the game was because I didn't "get it"; you can say something about media literacy here, I'm sure.

I do wanna start with the things that I like, namely the voice acting and music. I know the voices are a bit hit-or-miss for people, be it from factors inside or outside of the game, but I was a big fan, especially for the new voice acting in the new content. Similarly the music, new and old, was great to listen to; a lot of the new battle tracks made going through fights way more tolerable.

Speaking of, the new battle system. It's a lot fancier, faster, and just generally more involved than it used to be, but I still REALLY don't like it. I never personally played YIIK pre-I.V, so I was only a spectator to how dull it used to be, and this new one is WHOLLY better, I think I can say that for sure. The karta system I didn't really understand at first - I found the tutorial a bit difficult to follow because the presentation on the battles is so all-over-the-place and, frankly, hard to look at. And I was really worried about the battle system early on, because the sewer boss, the Golden Alpaca, actually required me to REALLY buckle down and understand the cards and timeline and skills and all that. However, that boss might as well have been the final boss, because the difficulty curve dropped off the face of the earth once we left that sewer; the further I got, the more damage everyone was doing, probably in part due to me fighting every enemy I could because I didn't want a repeat of the Golden Alpaca. You know how in the old battle system, one of Alex's moves seemed to be bugged and just instantly killed every enemy you hit with it after the 50% story mark? That's like, the whole game now. Your damage is off the charts, no matter whether its skills or basic attacks.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean that I wanted to do it, they're just a formality where I'm mashing the auto attack button and not even looking at the screen. Plus there's just some weirdness that I never really understood; sometimes when attacking an enemy with no cards, I would do no damage and JUST inflict Bleed, and sometimes I would instakill them (and inflict bleed). Sometimes my piercing attacks would go through their cards, drop their HP to 0 and they'd die, sometimes they'd randomly come back up to 1HP. That part happened to my own party a lot, too, and I didn't have the HP regen card on. The "bleed for me" visual and voice lines got old really fast (but I did like the detail that "robotic" enemies got a robotic vampire), and overall enemy HP values get so inflated that I'm pretty sure Bleed only exists to be detrimental to you. Items are still given to you in ludicrous quantities, money is still EXTREMELY easy to get (and I didn't start using the "get more money from fights" card until the Persona calender stuff was halfway done), and skill usefulness is still all over the place, so I'm just going to chalk all this up to "the devs don't know how to balance a turn based RPG". I guess I'd rather it be too easy than too hard, since I'm mostly here for the story anyway.

So, like, the story. Like I said, I didn't completely "get" the plot of YIIK; I didn't fully understand when I watched playthroughs of it in 1.25, and I don't fully understand now, but the story is just so weirdly written that it can't ALL be intentional. I don't think the writers are actually pretentious enough to say "well, if there's something you didn't understand, then you're not reading hard enough into it", or something; that's why I'm fully willing to accept the CompariSin stuff in the new content isn't meant to be taken at face value. And the script is more or less completely unchanged; Vella still can't explain why the Soul Survivors are kidnapping people, the Proto Michael thing is still basically totally pointless, Essentia's mind dungeon seems to still be pointless because of the endgame reveal, and most shocking to me of all (even though it's a minor point) is that the boss fight against the Flasher was changed, but the party still reacts the same way.

You may or may not know that Alex's long-winded monologues are still in the game, just fancified. The presentation might be better, but they're by no means any more tolerable; whether it's a deliberate, stylistic thing for the sake of making you dislike Alex or not, they're still a slog to get through, and was the source of most of my dialogue skipping. But speaking of cutscenes, there were actually some added into the main game, and they're so poorly paced I actually can't tell if it's a joke or not. There's almost NO animation in these, and there's several seconds of pauses inbetween EVERY piece of dialogue, it's excruciating. This is another reason why I find it difficult to believe the "Alex is annoying because he talks a lot" thing, the whole story is told like 5x slower than it needs to be for no reason. There's constant zoom-ins on character's faces, everyone is still as a statue, almost every piece of dialogue in these cutscenes is as vague as they're allowed to be without pissing the player off even more (I started tallying every time a character said some pseudo-philisophical nonsense, or asked a question and was told "I'll tell you later" or replied with nothing, but I stopped because it ramps up so dramatically near the end); the only way I could see anyone being invested in this plot beyond the surface level, is if you're already IN the fanbase because of the infamy this game has gained for itself ever since 2019.

And my god I was trying to be invested. I didn't go into this game wanting to ♥♥♥♥ on the effort put into I.V, I actually was looking forward to seeing how they expanded upon their game, their story, their characters, but time after time I barely got any new answers and just got more and more questions. Every time in the new content I felt that I was beginning to understand something, a new piece of information would appear and throw me off yet again. A handful of mysteries I can get, especially it seems that this game wants you to lean into the "conspiracy theorist" angle of the story, but it felt like every 30 minutes I was being fed another instance of "hey, remember this later, it'll be important." At some point you have to answer your questions before introducing new ones. To be honest, now that everything is done with, my biggest question is "what the hell was going on in YIIK pre-I.V? What does any of this have to do with the plot of the original game?" Because the fact that these new cutscenes are stapled awkwardly in the middle of the original script just makes me think that constantly.

This review has definitely rambled on way too long; that's what YIIK does to your brain. I just can't recommend this for any normal person - the RPG battle system isn't engaging enough, the plot is too nonsensical to fully understand without a council of people surrounding you, and the pacing is so glacial that even a viewing of it on Youtube or something will have you pressing the arrow keys frequently. This game is so insanely unique; if you play this game and GET it, you'd be so thankful that you were around to experience it, and be praising the developers for their genius vision for years to come. But for the rest of us, just avoid it, and watch some discussion videos on Youtube about it or something.

Still fun games even after all this time. My only "complaint", which is really my own fault for marathoning these games in a span of a few days, is that the janky controls started to bother me when I got to Achievement Unlocked 3 and beyond. Not enough of a deal breaker for me to not recommend it, though.

The short version is that I'd recommend watching a no-commentary run of this game, or watch a friend play it or something.

The story is extremely gripping throughout and extremely well-told, the characters are very engaging to watch and generally well-written (even if they're a little too trope-y for me in Headspace), and the in-battle art is fantastic; the artstyle is so pleasing to look at that it makes the gameplay remotely tolerable.

Which is the issue. Even if the gameplay-and-story integration is a great idea on paper with the emotion stuff, it can't avoid being just a standard, extremely boring, tedious, and flat RPG Maker combat system. It's functional, and it mostly just serves to waste your time between the actually interesting story bits. I believe that, for the most part, the really good RPG Maker games have no combat at all (Yume Nikki, Ib, etc), and even some that do (Space Funeral, OFF) 1. are short enough, and 2. understand that RPG Maker combat is boring and bad so they minimize it as much as possible.

OMORI basically goes out of its way to shove this horribly monotonous combat in your face repeatedly, to the point where there's an entire route of the game dedicated to having even more of it; I think all of the optional superbosses are stuck behind it. Which would be fine by itself, because again, it fits with the overall theme of the game extremely well. But behind all THAT, they stick actually interesting non-RPG Maker combat behind it!

I know at least 2 people that stopped playing this game purely because of the combat, and that is such a shame. Almost everything outside of the combat itself is so well made that it's just tragic to have it ruined because of the inbetween moments. And wasting time is kind of the name of the game even outside combat sometimes, too; I can get dragging your feet during important, high-stakes emotional story beats, but don't make me talk to a bunch of NPCs waiting in line, each having their own unskippable, repeated dialogue.

I took about 20 hours to beat this game, and it probably could have been cut in half without the pointless time wasting and gameplay. It's a game that's absolutely worth experiencing, but not at all worth playing.

Played this game co-op with a couple friends, had a ton of fun; the job system is very well realized, and was a joy to experiment with. We went in expecting to meme on the story, but it actually ended up being very engaging up to the end. Only complaints are that the game is extremely poorly optimized (which is widely known at this point, I think), and the equipment system is ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Getting (no exaggeration) 100s of pieces of equipment every single stage is just ridiculous, and the auto-dismantle system is kind of a bandaid fix.

But this game gets a huge score bonus for having a "skip cutscenes you've already watched" option in the menu, which is an option I've only ever seen in this game, and Dissidia.

I found this game by hitting the "random media" button on TVTropes a bunch of times. What a game to stumble into.

Compelling story, interesting and engaging story, the desktop parts are simple but fun, cute main character, some funny dialogue, great music... I wasn't really a fan of the platforming because it was really loose/slippery, and that's unfortunate because it's the bulk of the gameplay. But it's not enough of a detriment for me to say to NOT play this game.

Even though this isn't my kind of game, I was still blown away at how unbelievably well made this game is in every aspect. The presentation with the deranged graphics and amazing music; the gameplay with the numerous amount of moves your character can do, and how well they flow into each other; all the secret stuff with hidden areas in the hubworlds, in the stages, and even little easter eggs in the backgrounds; the huge list of quality of life features for casual players and speedrunners alike. It's a one-of-a-kind game.

If there's anything even remotely approaching a complaint or a criticism I have, it's probably that, to me, the visuals and the music don't really match. Both of them are obviously incredible with huge amount of care and effort put into them, but the insanity of the visuals strikes me as odd with this pseudo-retro-sounding soundtrack. Maybe the contrast is the point, but it's not like I would want the music to change.

What's in the game so far is great, as many people have already said it scratches the Star Fox itch very well, with a graphical style and soundtrack that is the very definition of "cool". My only issue so far, and this is more of a personal thing, is that I don't like the bonus levels, but that's only because I'm not a fan of the non-Star Fox game they're based on.

Despite that, I had this on my wishlist for forever, bought it as soon as it came out, and was very satisfied.