Recent reviews by Banjo Auditore

It was fun while it lasted.

This game takes way too long to get started, its combat is rather repetitive, the protagonist is a generic Russian tough guy (if you consume any type of Russian media, I'm sure you know what I mean), the story is basically a Bioshock setup.

The good part about it is the visuals, the levels themselves are beautiful, if a bit too bland with the colors (though I imagine this was an artistic choice). There is a heavy communist/futurist look to it but it doesn't seem to do much with the theme beyond the visual style. As another reviewer said, it was likely because of the risk political criticism entails in Russia, so good on them for keeping themselves safe.

If you really like Bioshock style gameplay and can tolerate a cynical, tough guy protagonist type along with a rather generic story setup, then this game is for you, buy it. If not, you're better off playing something else.

Yes

It's a musou game, not much to say on that front, you can expect the usual gameplay from these. Kill tons of guys at once and try to kill more of them faster.

The artstyle is very nice, some songs are cool too. The animations are also very fun to sit through, even if some of the effects can feel somewhat overblown.

==== STORY MODE AND SCENARIOS ====

The story mode has one cool element: Nobunaga's character and voiceactor. I really enjoyed it and if you're a fanboy of hero becomes villain stories, you'll enjoy what the story mode offers. Sadly Mitsuhide and his stages and development are not as great, always in Nobunaga's shadow, he doesn't get time to shine on his own which is to be expected considering where the story goes but still disappointing considering he was chosen to have one of the two scenario paths in this game.

I do miss a character story mode for other cool daimyos like Mori, Uesugi and Takeda. All three have great stories to tell but they're not here in this game, they're relegated as enemies of Nobunaga. I would also enjoy a set of what-if scenarios, but again, nothing here.


==== STAGES ====

The stages are generally boring. DW4 through 8 (the ones I played) bring in moving elements to the stages, or try to be at least a little bit innovative with the gameplay and/or provide cool cutscenes for the story given.

Since Samurai Warriors is based on historical events, they don't have as many cool romanticized events as ROTK does, but I'm very sure that if given the time, the dev teams can come up with some cool scenarios that isn't just two armies clashing against one another. What they do come up with often falls flat. The battle of Nagashino surprised me the most, it was a limp cavalry charge by two officers on horses towards the guns. If you can't provide cool visuals in gameplay, at least provide a decent cutscene, it's what the other musou games do. There are some stages, like the Burning of Hiei, that I found to be more evocative and fun to play through, but they were few and far inbetween.

Considering the low amount of missions, it's sad that each playable character doesn't really get their own thing to do during the missions. Plus, since you control two characters per mission, you'll usually do most if not all the optional objectives in your first playthrough. When you replay through the mission with another character, you'll do the same thing with another character.

==== CASTLE UPGRADING ====

Unless you want to replay through the same mission multiple times, you'll be forced to upgrade your castle to use characters that aren't Nobunaga and Mitsuhide later in the game. For this you have to sit through 'defend the castle' missions that are extremely repetitive in order to farm resources for castle upgrades. You get money from story missions, but not resources, so you have to play these missions.

As I said, they're boring, and it's a very archaic way of making you upgrade your stuff. The gameplay just doesn't provide enough variation to make itself fun on its own without some story beats and cool moments to accompany it.

==== CONCLUSION ====
Not worth its full price, wait for a big Koei discount that reduces the price to 35€.

If you like musou games and want more that isn't DW9, this is a good place to go.

If you are new to musou games. Try out Dynasty Warriors 4 to 8, depending on how well you can stomach old graphics.

If you want a good story, play DW7, though if you really like Nobunaga, you will enjoy Samurai Warriors 5, it's hyperfocused on his life.

If you want more Fallen Order, get this game. If you don't, don't get it. I wanted more so thumbs up from me.

The game's performance isn't too great, your graphic seetings don't matter. It chugs at various sections, it has random white boxes showing up if you move the camera too fast, if you wear any of the clothing pieces that use capes, you'll hear your graphics card revving up just to keep up with its physics, the galaxy map kills the framerate.

Story so far isn't too bad, hasn't gripped me yet but at least it treats you like an adult and doesn't spend too much time dialoguing while standing still or walking through a corridor (you get to do parkour when you have long winded talks). Gameplay's nice, the new styles are fun to look at. It doesn't feel too different from Fallen Order but I wanted more Fallen Order, so good on them.

The maps being more open doesn't add much to me. The secondary missions are somewhat lame, the NPCs' voiceacting is lacking. It's kinda like doing MMO quests rather than something truly engaging.

Amazing. Drop the game after act 2 though.

Conclusion: This is a game that could've been 15 hours long but they decided to make it 25-30 hours long. Try out the original FF7 and see if you can get past its age, if you can't then play this one.

Played up until the Shinra building.

There is a dance section in the Honeybee inn when you're invited by Andrea, make sure your parents don't walk in on that one.

Everything that was in the OG Final Fantasy 7 is great. Some of the added scenes work very well too, mostly the Tifa stuff,

The Sephiroth scenes suck. All of them do. It just ruins the initial mystery of his character that original FF7 kept until you reached Nibelheim. I guess not having Sephiroth in the first game was too much to ask for Tetsuya Nomura ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, in fact it was too much to ask for Sephiroth to be out of the screen for more than 2-3 hours. You'll be seeing Sephiroth's face at points and think "Not again", I started getting a similar reaction with the ghosts. It's like you're enjoying a fine story that's standing on its own two legs and you can just see Nomura's hand reaching in and telling you that he's there and directing the game so stuff is gonna get convoluted and weird.

WHY show the plushy cat (Cait) during one of the most emotional scenes of the game? He shows up out of nowhere so you suddenly see a goofy cartoon cat that you know nothing of feeling dejected and sad about what's happening, instead of focusing on the characters we do know who are ziplining for their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lives.

The side content is nothing, mostly walking around finding stuff in town or killing a few monsters. The dialogue in these would be their only saving grace if it were good, but it's just generic throwaway lines.

A lot of the scenes and conversations added don't do much since they can't progress the story, they're trying to pad out a 6-8 hour story into a 20-30 hour one and it shows when you listen to it.

There is a lot of padding. A LOT. Here's a few examples:
- Constant wall shimmys, seriously. You will be surprised how often the game makes you shimmy. It slows you down so a 4-5 second walk turns into a 10-20 second slog. Yes, Cloud's biceps are very detailed and shiny, I've seen them two dozen times up close already, thank you.
- Small sections of the original game turned into giant ones in this, but providing more or less the same content. So what was 3-4 screens in FF7 is now this giant sprawling dungeon in Remake with almost no enemy variety and constant running through halls and into battle arenas. (I see you, 10% player drop during Aerith's first section, who the ♥♥♥♥ came up with the hand crane puzzles?)
- Ladders everywhere.
- Some scripted battles go on for way too long, usually because of huge HP pools for bosses. You should technically come in prepared but you have no way to change materia mid-battle and you can't know a boss' weaknesses beforehand. So yeah, go and die once if you don't wanna spend 30 minutes fighting it with unprepared characters. You could also look up a guide online but having to do that is not a good show for a game like this.
- Chests with some really inane objects thrown around on dead ends. Those precious few seconds you spend going through the hall, opening the chest, getting the item and going back to the main path add up.

It's tiresome, it's nothing, it ruins what FF7 can provide to you as a well-crafted storytelling game so you get the big shiny headline that says your game is 40 hours long when released. I hope they move away from this in the next game and actually provide the original story with meaningful new content.

He aprendido que lo único que separa el comunismo del éxito económico es una buena infraestructura y países que quieran comprar una infinidad de recursos para financiar tu estado.

The game is alright, sadly Paradox has decided to move its entire team to other, more profitable, projects.

This means you can no longer expect updates or DLCs for this game, unlike the rest of the series the developer has got running like HOI, EU4, Stellaris and CK.

I asked if this game was going to get the EU:Rome treatment (getting abandoned after a dlc or two) and I was told it would, in fact, become another mainline franchise of the company. Considering what Paradox representatives have told the fans in their forums, it's clear that this will not be the case solely due to the fact that it's not raking in enough money for their corporate interests.

It feels like a big slap on the face to the loyal community it gathered who were providing feedback, assisting the developer team and keeping this game alive. Yet upper management can only see failure because the numbers on the sales are not and probably won't be green. To be expected? Yes. A gratifying conclusion to one of Paradox's most ambitious launches after Stellaris? Nope.

Once more, this company erodes the long term trust it has with part of its fanbase in favour of the medium term objective of maintaining investors happy with company numbers. Good on them and their green numbers, let's see if it works for them in the long run.

Very fun and a lot of potential for further development. Hard mode is a completely new game instead of a health/damage debuff.