Recent reviews by XenoAlbedo

We're highly trained professionals.

Much like the first game, I had a big, dumb grin on my face the entire time I played it, outside of when the game decided to gut punch me with a few story moments.

The cast remains great and their characters develop even further.

I think it's kind of funny how I started out trying to rush through FC and SC to get to the later games, but ended up struggling to finish this game simply because I didn't want it to come to an end and didn't want to see Joshua and Estelle start getting relegated to side-characters.

I've been binging a lot of old-school style JRPGs lately out of both nostalgia and a craving for mostly lighthearted, fun adventures. There's a chain of events that eventually led to me discovering this series, but the point is I saw screenshots from several games throughout it and instantly thought of games I used to play as a kid, or watched my brother play. Combined with the sci-fi fantasy setting I'm a sucker for, I ended up picking up most of the series.

I had this big, dumb grin on my face the entire time I played this game.

The cast of characters in this game is just great. They all feel distinct from one another and jokes usually land when they're meant to. Estelle in particular may now be one of my favorite protagonists of all time.

Great soundtrack and atmosphere with some pretty fun gameplay.

My main two points of complaint would be:
1. The ammo economy seems pretty limited for the amount of enemies as well as their general sponginess. It wasn't a huge issue, but there were a few moments that I felt suffered for it.
2. The QR code datapads. It's a neat concept, but it really hurts the pacing of the game to have to stop, pull out my phone, load up a QR code reader, scan it (50% chance it actually even works on my phone), and then read it. An in-game datapad option would be great.

An absolutely amazing game. The characters kept me invested and the sheer creativity allowed in solving problems, both inside and outside of combat, led to extremely unique encounters. This is genuinely one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

Your systems reading as optimal is suboptimal.

Boneworks? I sure hope it does.

I entered this game with a dislike of deckbuilding games.

I left this game with an addiction to deckbuilding games, crippling depression, and an overwhelming fear of trains.

The only thing more soul-crushing than the difficulty curve is the story.

The definition of a game that overstays its welcome.

The combat is fun, but not varied enough to carry two ~20 hour playthroughs. Hell, it's barely enough to cover half of one playthrough.

The story starts out interesting but proceeds to just drag on and on and get dumber with every single plot "twist," which was really just the writers trying to poorly cram another trope into their terrible plot.

Over 90% of the cutscenes are lazy slideshows that remind me of the skits from the Tales series but without the heart.