Recent reviews by 「AMOEBA」

A truly fantastic, enjoyably fun game hampered by the fact that it made to sell strategy guides first, introduce interesting gameplay second and telling a compelling story with interesting characters third. 6/10

When playing games nowadays I try to find something that I would enjoy playing all the way through, meaning from beginning to end getting 100% of what the game has to offer me. While that is the end goal, I do want to enjoy the game as much as I can without resorting to looking at guides or at least keeping it to a minimum as I want to figure things out on my own and experience the game through my own eyes. There comes a point though when playing some of these older titles where you come to a realization that the developers really did not respect the player's time, introducing some impossibly bizarre aspects that would normally take hours to comprehend, or you could just buy the strategy guide and figure it out in an instant. Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age is that type of game.

Which is a shame because this game seems like what a natural evolution of what a JRPG should be. It's a real-time strategy guide that allows for pausing and automation of commands to execute of what you want your characters to do at any given scenario. It offers a great "job" system that streamlines what games like Final Fantasy X-2 offered while keeping the complexity intact. Final Fantasy XII probably gives you the most control out of any JRPG I've played and if that's really all you're looking for then I can't recommend it enough. As a game it is great and for a casual playthrough I doubt most would have any major problems with some minor frustrations towards the last fourth of the main story I'd say.


But that's not the whole game now is it? Final Fantasy 12 is set in Ivalice, featured in the Final Fantasy Tactics games and honestly my favorite universe the franchise has taken us to. Besides being massive in size, the game has a large amount of races that aren't just humans with animal features. You have Bangaa, Nu Mou, Moogles, Viera (okay these are just tall humans with bunny ears), Seeq, and there's plenty more than those and we go into Final Fantasy 12 and... wow you hardly even touched any of them huh? The other races exist in this game, however your party features ONE of the unique races this universe has to offer... and it's the bunny girl. Don't get me wrong, Fran is probably one of two interesting characters the game explores, but yeah that should let you know where the game's priorities lie.

Let's run through the main cast, you have my favorites, Balthier, a supporting protagonist that is more of a leading man than the actual main characters in the story. Fran the Viera, who actually has an interesting history we get to briefly explore in the main story with her disconnect from her village and I'm not going to lie the drop off in quality is quite noticeable from here. Ashe is a princess seeking power and strength to reclaim her lost kingdom, Vaan is the main character but trust me half of the time you coulda fooled me with that one, Basch is a knight sworn to protect Ashe and he's got the personality of a 2x4 and Penelo has no purpose beyond the first fourth of the game. Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. Combined with a generic, "rescue the princess, save the kingdom" story, yeah 2 out of 6 ain't gonna cut it.

To touch on one last point I made in the beginning. Towards the latter end of the game and into the postgame content, Final Fantasy 12 has no respect for your time. Despite completing it in ~104 hours, this game is honestly very short. What I mean is this game is heavily padded out, designed to waste your time running around the map or trying every possible combination to figure out some solutions... or you can buy the strategy guide. Here's an example, the game features "Hunts" you can do, you can take assignments to kill mini-bosses throughout the world, the commissioner will tell you some history and where to go or watch out for. Once you get to the last few bosses, these commissioners essentially start telling you "Yeah I don't know where they are, go find them" and those aren't even the most egregious things the game does. There are creatures that don't spawn unless you wait for 30 minutes in an area, bosses that give no loot, rooms that only spawn treasure 1% of the time, a massive labyrinth of an area IN THE MAIN STORY that basically requires a map to navigate, come on man.


There's a good game here, I promise. It's just a shame it couldn't have been a great game.

Democracy wins again

It's enough to make a grown man cry... and that's okay

Ex-Riot Devs make a fun casual game. Run it exactly how a Riot game would be run, ranked, battle pass, awful matchmaking and even a garbage client to boot.
Realize this system only works because Riot has so much money to throw at their projects that they're going to make money eventually.
Game is now set to essentially be run by skeleton crew while they work on new projects.

Yup, this is a certified Riot dev moment.

Soul's Spectrum: Awakening is a puzzle game made in RPG Maker that for some reason has a lot of reviews that basically reword the game's description, have unusually proper grammar including the full title of the game, offer absolutely nothing insightful about the game, or some combination of the three. Now, I'm not trying to imply anything; all I'm saying is that if you read some of these vapid statements and genuinely believe that they were not, let's say, "encouraged" by certain parties to post them, I would recommend looking up the definition of gullible.

It's a shame because honestly, the game isn't bad. Don't get me wrong, the story isn't winning any awards, the visuals are "OKAY" at best, and I can't imagine paying real money to play a full version of this game, but it's just... okay. It's about what I would expect to play when finding out a game was made in RPG Maker, take that as you will.

If you want a TL;DR review of the game: It's free, and it's about an hour's worth of content, but we're not exactly looking at the next Undertale here if you get my gist.

What I want to focus on is the gameplay, mostly because everything else really isn't worth talking about. The gameplay is actually pretty neat, you have 4 forms you play with and the premise of the game maneuvering your way through the puzzles while playing around the strengths and restrictions each form gives you. It's a game that encourages you to die as when you do, you come back as the previous form in the cycle which may have the abilities you need to complete the puzzle.

Sounds decent, so why am I not recommending the title? My issue is, the people who made this game kind of showed their entire hand in the demo. I know what every form does, I know what every form is weak to and I get the general gameplay loop we're going for. Why would I buy this game? For the story? God no. For the visuals? It's RPG Maker style UI and if we're being generous, "decent" art. Why would I pay money for a full version of this?

The casuals that begged for Bystials for months to kill Tearlaments once and for all finally realized that not only do they destroy half of the rogue / casual decks they love so much, Tearlaments also play Bystials.

This game is a fun way to watch people who don't know how to play the game complain about the game and suggest the backwards ways of fixing the game they don't know anything about.

Highly Recommend

Me said game was trash many year ago.

Well well well, now everybody believe me.

Me is smart, can't get addicted if me know game was bad decade ago.

Common Gaijin L

Darkest Dungeon 2 is a very good game.

I think there's a lot of Elitism in the Darkest Dungeon community and you can see it pretty clearly in the reviews. People don't like change and would rather play the same game over and over again till the cows come home and are upset that Darkest Dungeon 2 is not the same game. I for one applaud Redhook for taking a chance on something new and rolling with it. This game is gorgeous and I think the time it spent over on EGS really helped iron out a lot of issues that exists with the game and now we have a much more polished product on Steam.

I have hundreds of hours on the first game, but I wouldn't at all consider myself attached to the first game, so if you want someone's honest opinion on the game without the blatant elitism that exists within this fanbase, I think I'm your guy. I think the main disconnect between the first game and now the sequel is the simple idea that:


In Darkest Dungeon 1 you are grinding your adventurers, taking to various dungeons to make them stronger. In Darkest Dungeon 2, you are setting out on the same journey, and slowly building up your adventurers and wagon through various defeats so that you can end on success. There's less investment in the sequel, but overall in my opinion provides a better gameplay loop.

The original had the issue of losing adventurers often meant losing literal hours and hours of your time building up a character is gone straight down the drain, leading many people myself included, not wanting to continue playing the game. In this game you are expected to fail, there's simply no way you can complete your expedition on the first, second, or third go. You are expected to fail, fail and fail until you build yourself up to be a strong fighting force, and even then the game is still challenging. There's numerous choices to make, dialogue to see and character growth that you can see and playthrough.

All in all, this game is fantastic, an easy step up from Darkest Dungeon 1.

If you're someone who's on the fence about this game because of the negative reviews, don't be. You can see it for yourself, this game is gorgeous and the combat is just an outstanding improvement on the original. Elitism is a plague on any community and rejecting a game that's genuinely well-made and outstanding just because it's different is easily the stupidest move any fanbase can do.


That being said, there's one thing I think both sides can agree on. Driving this wagon sucks.

Disco Elysium is truly one of the best RPGs of our generation.

To call this game good, even great is an understatement. To call this a game would undersell the amount of heart, soul and creativity that went into creating this masterpiece.

This is Art and the only fault I can give it is that I can't experience it multiple times since I know how it ends.

It's cute. That's probably the best thing I can say about it.

It's another game that makes me wish I could rate something as Mid rather than objectively Good or Bad.

The characters are cute, the artstyle is cute, the humor is juvenile but it's fine. The voice acting for everybody other than the main girls is just... bad I guess?
A lot of the humor is stereotypical and parody, but it doesn't make it any less unfunny, a lot of that "lol look how wacky I am" type of humor bleeds into the voiceacting and it's kinda eh.

It plays well enough, though I've never seen an RPG style game where regardless of how strong you get the enemies don't die any quicker. I'm at the end game now and maybe the same enemies I fought in the beginning die a little quicker now? I can't tell if that's because my stats are increased or I just have so many moves now that I can just deal with them more efficiently now.

It's short, which is honestly a good thing because if this game went any longer I think I would give it a bad rating.


It's not a bad game, but I'd be upset if I paid $30 for this. Look for a lower price, it's a $15 game at best.