Recent reviews by Chami

The only game I would be willing to describe as "beautiful."

You see that this comes recommended, so let's just cut to the chase. There are things I hate about this game. Don't get me wrong, I S-ranked this game on the hardest difficulty. I just don't want people to buy it, and then discover that they actually hate it. So I'm going to focus on the negatives after breezing through the good stuff.

The good stuff:
- tight controls
- great combat
- setting (music and art) looks very good
- great boss fights
- good nostalgic feel (if you like retro games, then you'll like this)
- characters and enemies are designed well

First of all, this game is hard. But it's not the feel-good Mega Man 9 kind of hard. There are times when I hit a snag in a boss fight or a tricky platforming segment and it just feels unfairly difficult. One of the reasons for this is that your character has no invincibility frames. This means that you'll get combo'd really hard sometimes, where you'll find yourself at full health one second, and zero the next (I'm not sure if they changed this or not, but there was this one stupid enemy that was capable of stun-locking you. What the heck is that all about, seriously?).

The story, in my opinion, had a lot of potential, but I was really annoyed about all the forced tropes and forced "fantasy" names to things; they don't sound like natural words to me. Plus, all the characters are, to avoid spoilers, "special" in some way, as if it's wrong to have some sort of normal main character. IIRC, one character is the last living member of an ancient civilization, one character is the daughter of a god, one guy is half-angel-half-demon or something, one is the only half-dragon or something?. What I did like was the premise. I really like the demons and angels warring against each other, and that neither side was right in the eyes of the main characters. The premise was good, the characters, not so much.

Lastly, this game has retro roots. Because of that, it does feel dated. Things like not having enough clues to tell you where to go next, or clues that only appear once, or sidequests that don't give you enough information feel dated compared to newer games. While this isn't much of a problem for some gamers, it's a problem for most. People are lying if they say that they never had any struggles with lack of direction with games like this one.

It still comes recommended, but as long as you're okay with VERY cliched characters, sometimes BROKEN gameplay, and potentially being LOST, then go for it. But if you're down for some retro gaming style, then go for it anyway.