Recent reviews by fearseeker

Really competent budget souls like.

Weapon variety is basic but functional. Combat feels well balanced for the most part.

Enemy variety is decent, but is used creatively; This is what carried the game for me - encounters almost never feel like repeats and a decent chunk of the levels has some kind of environmental design that mixes up how encounters play out (narrow paths, poison swamps, rooftop snipers).

I'd recommend the game, with one big caveat: the gameplay is really lackluster. This game 100% lives and dies on its charm and atmosphere.

A very good game but, of my 21 hour runtime, about 8 cut have been left on the cutting floor.

Character writing is great.
Story writing starts of good, but tries a bit too hard to be deep and artsy towards the end.
Gameplay has its moments, but is very tedious.

Recomendation: Watch the first 15-30 minutes on youtube, to see if you like the characters - they are like 80% of the reason to play this game.

Just okay.

The monsters are good, the new area is okay, and the new bosses are disapointing.

For the low price point I'd recommend it, if you want to support the dev.

Astounding amount of gameplay, and stellar modding comunity.

Short version: Combat is bad, story starts strong but doesn't go anywhere, Level-design is grindy. Skip this one, unless you are starved for a Tales Games.

Long Version:
This review will be aimed at those, allready familiar with Tales-Games, and will contain minor spoilers in the Story section.


:The gameplay dies a death of thousand cuts. You are battling in real-time, on a 3d map, as expected from the newer tales games. New are the so called "SOULS" which limit the amount of attacks you can do, and can be gained and lost through different actions and items. In addition every Character gets some form of special ability which consumes a SOUL but are stronger than normal attacks, and usually allow you to create longer combo-chains. Why should you care about your combo? The damage your characters deal is directly tied to the height of your combo-counter.

The idea is interesting in its core concept, but it has a really big flaw in it's execution: You either completely wipe the floor with your enemies, or you get reduced to hit and run tactics slowly grinding away at your enemies health bar.
You gain Souls by executing combos, and to execute combos you need souls. If your combo count is low, it's more likely that you'll get stunned by an enemy, which in turn will reduce your SOULS and the ability to do combos.
There are some mechanics in place to mitigate this effect, but they will be handed to you fairly late in the game, and they consume BG, which - you guessed it - can be gained by performing attacks with SOULS.
During Boss battles this effect becomes even more severe, as most bosses have some form of hard to dodge attack, that reduces your SOULS.

If this was the only problem of the game, it would have a mediocre battle system, but saddly it isn't.

The controll Scheme seemingly aims to streamline the usual button-mashing battle style that Tales Games are known for. Allowing you to customize pre-set combos to each button, and changing the attack according to which place in the combo you have reached. You can transition seemlessly between each combo, at any point, in theory allowing you to map up to 4 x 4 atacks (4 buttons with four stages for each combo), as well as some non-combo commands.

In practice this controll scheme is just plain counterintuitive. Instead of knowing which attack is assigned to which button, you have to constantly keep track, of exactly where in your combo your are at the moment, to know which atack will be executed by each button press. On top of that, it actually reduced the amount of atacks and abilities you can bind, when compared to the classical tales system (4 buttons + 4x4 button and direction combos). Maybe this system could work, if it wouldn't add further "administrative overhead" to a system that allready hinged heavily on timing, blocking, and how you chained certain attacks.


The final nail in the coffin is the approach to enemy design. Every enemy deals large ammounts of damage, meaning you largely rely on keeping your enemies staggered by piling on attacks.

Bosses are largely immune to beeing staggered.....

Entire sections had their mood completely ruined, because, what was supposed to be a climatic battle, devolved into a benny hill routine, a I ran away from the bosses "if I hit you once, you will spend the next 2 hours watching me as I stagger you to death"-attacks.


The developers still havn't quite understood that they don't have a overworld map anymore, and they approach their map design with the same design-philosophy as you would design classical JRPG-dungeons, meaning you are in for a marathon session of the less-than-stellar combat. There is little to distract you from the Slay-athon, as nearly all traces of puzzling have been eliminated from the game. Instead of puzzles you get a bunch of fancy buttons (runes, crystals, fancy chalices, ...), each with their own fancy animation, but with little to offer to actual gameplay.
The equipment system is not as absurdely cumbersome as in Zestiria, but you still will spend a unhealthy amount of time staring at your inventory, sorting through the long list of generic generated Loot. If you just thought about just equiping the weapon with the strongest attack value and selling the rest, say hello to the newly added "mastery" and crafting system. Now it's all but required that you learn to like your new job as "Senior Inventory Manager" if you want your weapons to do a decent amount of damage.
The lack of unique or even just interesting items also means that there is little worth to exploring. Gold chests, which - according to the game - contain unique high level loot, will reward your with the same generic items you just got from fighting a random enemy.

There are some non-required mini-games throughout the world, which are decently well implemented... which would be more impressive if they weren't the same kind of minigame that every JRPG since Final Fantasy I used.

Also there is a time-based side-mission - as in: Click the button. Wait 30 Minutes. Receive random reward which you can't influence in any meaningfull way.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that BAMCO played arround with the idea of micro-transactions, but they would never do that, would they now? *sarcasm end*

For those of you that like to play dress-up with their characters, the custom parts are locked behind a collectible currency... which lies pretty much everywhere and makes the world look like a sonic stage... and also respawns whenever you leave the area... and will be needed in such amounts that you will have to revisit a lot of areas...

You know, if one was of a more cynical nature than I am, one could assume that this has something to do with the custome-dlc that was released, but that would be all together to crass now, wouldn't it?


The story is damn shame, and might very well be the source of much of my vitriol concerning this game.

!SPOILERS - and ranting - aheady!

The game starts strong, setting the protagonist up as some revenge driven anti-hero, with a very large helping of "anti". This works really well for a while. As the player, you are constantly aware of just how hypocritical the protagonist' actions are, and it honestly feels like a good tragedy, to watch the protagonist slip over the moral even horizon.
Then the game reveals, that you were actually supposed to root for the protagonist...

The same protagonist that has left a trail of bodies behind her, that makes Gengis Khan seem squeamish in comparison.

So what does the game feel, justifies all the horrible acts that were committed throughout the game?
The character was nice to a little kid and didn't kill "everybody" that was in her way.

By the way, Hitler wasn't such a bad fellow. I mean he had a pet dog he took good care of, he can't have been a complete monster... *sarcasm end*

This wouldn't bother me as much if, from that point onwards, the whole universe wouldn't bend back over backwards to make the protagonist seem like a good person.
All of the antagonists suddenly start eating babies, kicking dogs, and peeing in the public pool, to the point that all of their so far revealed motivations and character traits just go out the window.
All of your horrible actions just so happen to have been justified (completely ignoring the fact, that the protagonist had now way of knowing that when she committed said acts) - or are simply brushed aside by the protagonist saying "I accept that people will view me as a monster.".

ME: "Oh, how nice! Does that mean you will stop acting like a complete monster?"
Protagonist: "No."
ME: "Good to know. I will now start running away screaming if you don't mind."


Oh, and Zaveid is back. Because of all the Zestiria Characters, I really wanted to see the badly written piece of emtpy machismo, that is too busy beeing edgy to have a actual character.

The Tales game have always been JRPGs with a capital J.

So I went into this game, fully expecting motivational platitudes, every fight doing double duty as a metaphor for some metaphysical struggle, and unneccessary romantic tension. You know... the good stuff.

What I got instead, was a 40 hour ride of word barf, vaguelly directed at the viewer.


One of the characters defining trait is, quite literally, that she can't talk about anything relevant to the plot if it could serve to minimize unneccessary drama. And why is that? MAGIC!
Indeed, for as many times as MAGIC has to rescue the plot from whatever corner it has currently driven itself into, it's a miracle that the main character isn't named Copperfield.


I stopped playing the game, after having to sit through a half hour cut-scene which, if the music and cinematography was anything to go by, was supposed to be a the big climatic pre-final battle recap of whatever the heroes learned on their journey. For 30 minutes the characters talked non-stop, delievering one non-sequitur after the other, as long as it sounded even mildly philosophical. And having said absolutely nothing at all, the game then proceeded to show fireworks, like a child who thinks it won an argument by saying "Nuhu, you're stupid!".


That is the big theme of the game: The Creators obviously wanted to raise some big questions about sacrifice, and duty, and what is neccessary to gain peace, but never stopped to consider that at some point they also would have to present answers to those questions.

I would recommend this game, with some caveats:

Let's clear out the good stuff first. This game is gorgeous. Art-style, narration, and mood come together to form a wonderfully depressing world that's constantly on the brink of madness. To be clear, the reason why I recommend this game at all is the atmosphere it manages to build.


The rest is a mess.

It totes the newly rediscovered flag of "brutal" gameplay, a style of game that gained prominence with the advance of the Darksouls series. From the get-go you are told that this game won't pull it punches.
And that's where the game fails; Like many rouge-lites, Darkest Dungeon heavily relies on randomness. Random Heroes, random abilities, random enemies, random missions. In fact the game is so random that as a player I never really felt in control of the game.

High miss chances, reliance on critical hits, buffs and debuffs of questionable usefulness, this game takes all the problems associated with turn-based RPGs and amplifies them in the misguided hunt for ultra brutal combat.
One could argue that this adds to the atmosphere of helplessness, but that doesn't change the fact that combat is tedious at best.



As I said, overall I would still recommend the game, but if you want to enjoy the Lovecraftian experience that is Darkest Dungeon you better have the temper of a saint.

With the addition of the Magic System, this studio has managed something truly astounding:

This game is at the same time insultingly simple, and yet an absolute mess of trial and error gameplay.




In General, Dating Sims of any kind get measured by an different standard compared to most games. At its best the Genre is Character Development/Discovery condensed. Saddly most studios use that excuse to release sub-par titles with little to no imagination and even less effort, and while Magical Diary may not lack the latter, it definetly lacks imagination.


The Characters: Copy Paste. You've seen it before, you'll see it again. A forgettable parade of cliches.

The Choices: Linear in all but appearance. Choose in whoose pants you want to get and stick with it. This would be less of a problem if not for....

Gameplay and Story integration: The Holy Grail of all dating sims. Does it feel like you are playing the game, or like you are gaming the system? Magical Diary takes the sledgehammer approach to subtlety and even those unafiliated with the Genre will see any character twist coming for miles.
Except for the magic system, which I had alluded to earlier. Along with the usual fair of stats, as the game progresses you get to learn a selection of different colour coded magics. In theory you get to use these to influence the events arround you. In practice, the rather ethereal description, limited application of every spell, and utter lack of audio-visual cues, I often felt thrown back into the era of Adventure games, where every puzzle was solved by liberaly rubbing anything in your inventory on anything in the environment.
That's where the game steps in, and limits just what you can try via an MP-Gauge, or simply time constraint.


I'm sure after a second or third playthrough I could have gotten the results I wanted, but the entirely predictable characters, and obvious right/wrong choice system left me with little desire to play again.


All in all Magical Diary is rather tragic: A novel idea that lacks any kind of substance to back it up.